Was Harry Potter Ever Good? | A Harry Potter Video Essay 

So to address a few reoccurring responses: A lot of characters who are Black in the films are not distinctly Black in the text until significantly after their film appearances (if ever). Yes, The Worst Witch should have been mentioned. I misinterpreted the Rick Riordan article so I thought he was criticizing Palestine, not supporting it. I should have mentioned Nina's magical powers are basically emotional manipulation and later necromancy The only good Earthsea adaptation is the BBC Radio broadcast. There are a number of YA fantasy series published prior to Harry Potter, but I think Harry Potter's success helped elevate them to a more mainstream status. A rising tide lifts all ships. I'll update this as I notice more responses. Just wanted to clarify that now.

I don't think HP being so UK-centric and focusing on Voldemort only being a threat to the UK and not really addressing the rest of the world is that unusual. A lot of American-centric stories do the same thing with their stories.

I think Rowling is a much much simpler woman than she believes herself to be, and the flaws in her approach as a storyteller become more and more clear the higher age demographic she tries to write for.

There's absolutely no way that Hogwarts would teach that Salazar Slytherin was a bad guy in real life. They'd try to gloss over his fascism, and when they do teach him, they'd call him a "polarizing" figure.

Pro writer here. The fact that kids can project themselves into the book is massive, but also Rowling’s real talent is the ability to write characters (especially bad guys) in such a way that it illicits a strong emotional reaction in the reader. I went to a boarding school and there was one teacher at this school that absolutely everyone was terrified of, even including kids like me who weren’t in his class-and for good reason. Dude was a total asshole who reprimanded me once for not saying “please” to someone *else* in such a traumatic way that I still have the memory of it to this day. When I read Harry Potter, Snape wasn’t Alan Rickman, Snape *was* that teacher. Fear of Snape and hatred for Umbrage and love for Hagrid and Dumbledore are something the reader feels on an emotional level with such intensity that it actually drives immersion with the series.

As an Argentinian, I remembered I was so confused when I found out that the southamerican school of magic was on Brazil, one of the few countries in Latinamerica where spanish is not the official language. Like, what are the spanish speaking people suppose to do??😂 learn portuguese just to go to school?? That's madness. That was the moment where i realized she didn't know a thing about the world outside England.

Animorphs should have been the popular youth series. Don't let the silly morphing covers fool you. Inside the pages of Animorphs you will find an epic war tragedy. The child heroes go through bloody combat, ptsd, psychotic breakdowns, moral failings, and meaningful sacrifices. There are consequences, character growth, and upsets to the status quo. Animorphs!

No wonder there’s so much Harry Potter fanfiction. Half of the building blocks aren’t there, or most of them have such clear flaws that people can’t help but want to rebuild it into what they’d want.

Her whole “the status quo is good, ambition is always a red flag” thing goes even further than villainizing people who want more that what they’re given or who don’t meet her beauty standards. Rather, she elevates social station itself into a universal truth. You’re either magic or a muggle (or squib). No muggle can become magic because they don’t have the magic genes. And all muggles we meet - even the sympathetic ones - are presented as stupid, shallow, shortsighted and incurious. GEE, SUBTLE ONE THERE, Granny Jojo. -_-

As a Ukrainian I have to say that putting all post-Soviet countries together in one school is wrong for so many reasons. That school is permanently on fire. And, well, that's very much russian colonialism there;-;

Even when I was a kid I though it was so dumb that Rowling got away with not explaining how magic works or the history of the magical world by just going “Harry was bored by it so he wasn’t listening”.

A dear friend of mine insisted I read 'A Wizard from Earthsea'. Every time I mentioned HP, he kept telling me it Earthsea was better and I'd love Ursula K. Le Guin. He was right. It was the best recommendation he gave me, and I'm very grateful for him being kind of an asshole because he didn't like HP 😂

It is WILD that Rowling is now claiming that a key part of the whole "wizard Nazi" we thought was that main real-world-relevant parallels of the books was TOTALLY ACCIDENTAL! I'm not sure if I believe it, but at the same time, I totally can believe it. Because when I first read the books I assumed one of the reasons Hermione worked so hard is because she's Muggle-born and knows she's going to have to be twice as good to be respected...because that's what every real-world minority kid/child of immigrants/woman in a male field knows! But then I realized - no, she's an over-achiever just because, and Rowling doesn't seem to know there are stages of oppression in between rude names and genocide...

I've been aware of this for years now, but the real contribution I got from Harry Potter is all from fanfiction, from reading stories where people see the problems of the original books and come up with better ways to do things, to deal with problems, to ask questions, to change.

As a Brazilian guy, Castelobruxo completely baffles me. It's an Aztec-like pyramid hidden in the middle of the Amazon rainforest (where likely no Aztec ever stepped) as if anyone could properly get there, and the school houses Brazilian and other Latin American wizards. Now, what language are the classes in? Most students would speak Spanish. However, the school's name is in Portuguese and it's in Brazil, which would suggest Portuguese. Also caiporas, keep in mind that Caipora is a protector of nature, now protects this man-made building for some reason. All that in what I suppose is one of the lesser offenders.

In the first book, you could see Slytherin house, and Snape’s bullying, from a kid’s perspective. It worked because you experience bullies and scary people as a child. But as the series goes, it turns out that Slytherin actually is evil. Draco Malfoy’s dad is just blatantly a Death Eater and nobody notices.

The problem with slytherin is how in one hand rowling says is the house of ambition and cunning, not necessarily being a bad thing because wizards like merlin (that is why i liked being in that house).... but in the other hand, every character she mentions being in slytherin are not described, or described with weird malformations, unhealthy appaerance, or being too thin or too fat... or uf they are relevant, aleays plain evil

There's a distressing lack of Terry Pratchett in this video, despite him being pretty much point for point the Nega-Rowling.

Harry Potter somehow managed to capture lighting in a bottle and released at the right time.

As a 21 year old reading Percy Jackson for the first time… I kinda wish I read it for the first time as a kid

I've only ever watched the first two movies. And I remember finding it weird that Slytherin was just inherently evil. At the end when Slytherin was supposed to win whatever, and then Dumbledoore kept giving points to Gryffindor until they'd beaten Slytherin, I remember think 'does JK Rowling just really hate Slytherin?'

I joke (as a former Hp kid) that Harry Potter was only big because Anime wasnt a thing in the West yet. But this video made me realize it was kinda our first real Otaku Culture with Fanfics and everything lol.

In its heyday, there WAS one other thing that allowed kids like us (Granted, I was in high-school when my maternal grandparents introduced me to these books) to immerse ourselves in the power-fantasy of "Higher Education As An Escape-Hatch From Your Normie-Dipshit Upbringing." "Hello. My name is Professor Charles Xavier. Welcome to my School For The Gifted."

"The magic happened, and the magic is gone." That's a great way to sum up how I feel about the series now. It was great while I thought it was great, but I've moved on and find magic in other stories now!

I want to clarify that there's two primary ideas of magic in fantasy: Hard Magic (explain the rules, keeps consistent) and Soft Magic (strange and unknown, story based). Harry Potter's issue is not that the magic is soft and we want a hard magic. Soft magic can be some of the best fantasy you read, because it relies on the writer's ability to inspire wonder and fear and confusion in you. It wields the confusion to its benefit to set magic aside from science. HP has neither. Her magic is soft when she doesn't want to explain, and harder when she decides to set an arbitrary limitation. She made it up as she went and only detailed the part that she cared about. Example: incantations seemed to be necessary to cast in earlier stories, you had to say the spell usually. But then she realized that she can't write gun-based action scenes off that, so later on people just hurl spells from wands like bullets. No strategy, no specific use of a spell, just blasts like it's fucking D&D and they only learned magic missile. The problem isn't that HP's magic is too soft. It's that it is straight up fucking stupid.

One of the biggest problems from a pure world building standpoint? The magic is boring. There's never an explanation of how it works or what makes somebody a powerful wizard. Magic is just a convenience in her world. After moving on to other fantasy books this only became more apparent

I read these books right after immigrating to a different country as a disabled kid. I dropped them after the 2nd? book because, even if i couldnt express it at the time, i understood that, if i had anyone to identify with in those pages, it was the non magic humans, the ones who are made fun of, used, abused and powerless to do anything about it. JKR may like to say this is a world for everyone, but it didn't take me long to realise that she never believed it.

Harry Potter's strength is its aesthetics, not the books themselves. The books don't even matter - the merchandise is.

Already subscribed after the mention of Six of Crows and PJO but anyone who brings up Fullmetal Alchemist in a discussion about literary merit is automatically one of my favorite people. As far as I am concerned, Fullmetal Alchemist (the manga, in its og form) is as close to perfect as a story can get :)

Aside from Earthsea being decades prior to HP and doing the concept of scholastic magic far, far better, there are other far more on-the-nose examples that it looks like Rowling copied. The Worst Witch is a fairly obvious one, but the example that pissed me off the most was Groosham Grange, primarily because Horowitz said he wouldn't continue the story, first published in the 80s, for fear of being perceived as ripping off Rowling.

And don't forget, she put The Latín América Magic school in The only country that don't speak spanish (Brasil). That show You that she don't Even try.

Harry Potter was not GOOD. It was FUN, especially if you were in the age group that "grew up" along with the book's characters.

I think a good bit to bring up is Brennan Lee Mulligan and Matt Mercer's discussion on how bonkers and not thought out the HP universe is. Like it's pretty funny.

Neville Longbottom grows, he goes from being an insecure, timid, bullied young boy whom few take seriously to leading the students during the seventh book at Hogwarts, to standing up to Voldemort and the Death Eaters, killing Nagini and being a lot more confident, positive person.

I think the aesthetic and John Williams score really carried the series for me which is probably why I've only enjoyed the first 3 movies and the Universal Theme park. It was an escape but once you actually think about the stuff in these books/ movies its kinda just stories and characters that have all been done better somewhere else

Video: “Was Harry Potter ever good?” Me: “yes” Video: “its not a masterpiece” Me: “Ohhh, you thought it was a masterpiece. Thats rough buddy.” Looking forward to see what you say.

I find it a little sad how the main appeal of the Harry Potter series isn't mentioned at all. In simple terms, the dialouge in Harry Potter is very much like how children would and do behave at this age, though with a bit more polish. And with her background as a teacher this is her main strength as a writer. Rowling is extremely good at depicting the thoughts and actions of adolecents that the entire series is carried on this idea. This includes the childlike wonder of magic, which shouldn't be a strictly defined system of spells to begin with, as it would be less immersive for the intended audience. All in all Harry potter isn't meant for adults, and more complicated fantasy books like Game of Thrones, and Mistborn just simply aren't for children. It would be come a homework assignment instead of something fun. And that's ok. The important bit is to what extent a work appeals to its intended audience, and Harry Potter is incredible at it. In short, falling put of love with something doesn't make that something bad, just that your tastes have changed, and that's ok.

Makes you wonder if Harry Potter would be as popular if it came out today.

As someone who started reading HP in their twenties, I never had much illusions about the series. It was a cute school series with some random magical elements sprinkled in top. To me, it was pretty clear from the start that there was little underneath the surface. I mean, look at Quiddich, a game so ridiculously designed to give the male protagonist a big hero moment, single-handedly winning what was ostensibly a team sport. The one redeeming quality the author had was her ability to write a good plot twist. The biggest strength of the first few books were the endings that subverted expectations and surprised us. But as the serious dragged on, the lack of vision became cleared and clearer. You can see it in the Quiddich matches as much as everything else. The loopholes the story has to go through to make the games interesting beyond catching the Snitch is telling. And then the world got increasingly darker, lost it's initial charm, while more and more bad world-building was stacked upon upon each other. By the time the last books rolled around, reading them felt more like a chore, and the best thing about the ending was that it gave me enough closure to put the series down and ultimately stop caring about it. Looking back, it feels like a mix of traditional boarding school fiction, a sprinkle of barely understood magic and a good sense of pace and suspense that caught on fire at the exact right time and snowballed into this huge phenomenon. Lucky break.

I myself found it quite fascinating how Lord Vetinari changed throughout Pratchett's books- and how some of his character reverted as the illness took more and more of poor Mr. Pratchett

I consider myself fortunate to have grown up reading the works of Terry Pratchett, and that the whole 'potter' thing passed me by unnoticed. There was so much to the text and subtext in Pratchett's output, and a genuine warmth and love of a flawed humanity underneath it all, and a mystified indignation at how barmy we can be at out worst, that seemingly just isn't present in rowling's writing Plus the author himself being a delightful rascal who decided that, having been knighted and therefore legally permitted to wear a sword, sourced some meteoric iron and forged his own sword of meteoric iron, is so much better than spending hours on twitter inserting retroactive representation and worldbuilding about pooping into the canon

There's a book series I'd like to compare Harry Potter to: The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes. Like Harry, the main character of that series suddenly becomes insanely rich. An oil billionaire dies and leaves her the vast majority of his fortune, but nobody is really sure why he did that, since they were complete strangers. The major thrust of the book series is about figuring out why he made that decision, but the books are also about challenging people's preconceptions of this guy and his immense wealth. Avery doesn't have those preconceptions because she has never been rich before. She isn't comfortable with suddenly being a multi-billionaire, but she's kind of stuck with it because the protection afforded by his money is the only thing keeping her from being murdered by those who feel that they got screwed in the will. As the book goes on, it turns out that this guy had some skeletons in his closet. He screwed over a lot of people to become the man he was. One of those people is out to get revenge by usurping his family fortune. He knew that if he left the money to any of his sons, they'd have a target on their back, so he knowingly put the target on hers instead. She eventually succeeds in keeping the fortune out of the wrong hands, but also points out that no single person's hands are the right ones, not even hers. That storyline ends with her resolving to give away the vast majority of the money, either through charity or as prizes in elaborate games (something that will be followed up on in the next book). This is what a character actually challenging the status quo of their world looks like. Avery saw the problems caused by this family's immense wealth and solved them by distributing it, while calling into question the idea that anyone should be that rich.

SPEW and how people treated Hermione for starting it and the justifications for slavery, nuff said

Something I just realised is in the comparison between Harry Potter and Percy Jackson. One is a series that has been unable to grow past it's initial run. The other is a series which has continued well into the present day and has an infinite number of stories that could be told

Ambition alone does not put you in Slytherin. Percy Weasley.

It really is funny how two decades ago, the Prequel Trilogy was seen as a joke that allowed Harry Potter to take Star Wars’ place as THE cultural media touchstone. But the older we got - and the more aware of the world we became - the more we realized that George Lucas had a lot of intelligent things to say about how neoliberal centrism can give rise to fascism while JK Rowling had *nothing* to say. We shunned the man who told us the harsh truths we needed to hear and embraced the fairy tale worldview of a woman who never believed in the line she was selling. Perhaps that’s how we wound up with the world we live in now.

The problem is not really the fact that nothing changes. The problem is that the "nothing changes" is not planned and not trying to say anything. There are many good creations that have an ending where the characters and world stay the same (I have several examples off of my head, but they're mostly theater because I'm a theater magor), but they are criticizing the world and characters, and through them, criticizing the world we live in. My favorite example is the play "Mother Courage and Her Children" by Bertolt Brecht and Margarete Steffin. In the beginning and the end of the play, Mother Courage (the main character) stays practically the same, and the same war is going on all throughout the play, and nothing changes although (spoiler) all of Mother Courage's children die throughout the play. But the whole point of this play is to criticize the capitalistic world that is full of wars. This is on purpose, and has a reason. And this is done really well. So my point is, I agree with you in general, but I think this is important to note

Please provide one example of Dudley being mocked for his weight by another character. And no, Fred referring to him as a great bullying git, does not count.

Not to be a hipster but I always felt this way. As a big reader I felt these were very much potato chips books but I know a lot of avid readers that felt differently so 🤷🏻‍♀️

I was a bit over the age range when Harry Potter came out, I was at that 'I am too cool for kid stuff phase' of my teenage years. Which is ironic. But even to this day I never connected with it or knew anyone that did. And I am British too, Harry Potter was wild over here in the early 2000's, it was on everything, but I kind of flew over it. But in hindsight I am glad I never had that attachment seeing how the author has been behaving.

I used to be a Potterhead. I read the first book when I was Harry's age and there were no sequels out yet; I was a fan from the start and grew up with the series. I was obsessed. But, luckily... HP wasn't my first literary love. My enjoyment of the series started to decline as the films were coming out, and when book 5 was published, I already didn't GAF. Why? I started feeling that the books were mediocre as hell. When I was 10, I didn't notice this at all. An idea came to me WAY before JK became an outspoken bigot; the idea that HP was manipulative. That it drew me in so bad because it offered the perfect fantasy (another world where you're rich, famous, and accepted) rather than because of any narrative merits. Has anybody else felt like that early on?

I want more people to call out the racism behind Cho Chang. So many try to give Rowling the benefit of the doubt, try to argue that some romanisation systems and some dialects can render certain characters as "Cho Chang". But here's the thing - Rowling names all her other characters meaningfully, even the unfortunate ones like Shacklebolt. If Rowling had researched a specific culture and language to come up with a meaningful name for Cho Chang, she would have told us what her name meant, how it's written in the original language, and boasted loudly about her research efforts YEARS ago. The fact that she has never done so, inadvertently reveals that there never was any research nor any meaning to the name. Rowling thinks Asian names are just meaningless sounds. The Chinese translation of Harry Potter "translates" her name with qiu 秋 instead of any of the characters pronounced as "cho", because having a given name be homonymous with chou 醜 (especially in a culture that places so much emphasis on wordplay) would be very unfortunate and unpleasant.

"It fails to understand that there exists a world outside of Britain." So like how most shows form the USA are about the USA. As someone from central Europe I got used to it. All the different planets in Star Trek and Stargate etc. are very very American. And in anime everyone behaves very Japanese, no matter where they come from/where the anime is supposed to take place. I gave up complaining about that.

Every time I watch the D.A. Training scene in Order of the Phoenix I’m disappointed Harry doesn’t become a teacher, come on Joan

For anyone reading the comments looking for book recommendations: Read Belle Revolte. It's a queer fantasy nove; about two girls swapping magic schools, with a well defined hard magic system with clear limitations, and is about overthrowing a corrupt Monarchy.

It's noted that when people want to dislike a series, they go out of their way to focus on things (ethics, logical consistency etc) that are irrelevant to why people like it and treat the things that people love (humour, tone, genre-mixing, characters) as "quirks" that have nothing to do with literary quality.

I don't think she ripped of Earth Sea, I think she ripped off Worst Witch.

One of the few positive memories I have with my mom as she was being treated for cancer was reading through the Harry Potter books with her. Now I feel like those memories are tainted because of Rowling's bigotry and general terribleness.

I disagree with your take the Harry Potter's use of a soft magic system is detrimental, because it's partially responsible for the series' broad appeal. A lot of folks don't like having to wrap their heads around hard fictional systems. It's the same reason why Star Wars was so initially successful, where rules around things like "The Force" are never explained mechanically, only emotionally. For all her flaws, Rowling was extremely good at having her plots make emotional sense, allowing most readers to suspend disbelief and follow along. Soft magic itself really isn't the problem. Look at all the stuff in Lord of The Rings that's never explained outside "a wizard did it." The problem is Rowling failed to integrate her soft magic system into the wider world, something she DID build hard rules for, forcing audiences to see the soft magic more critically. Things like every adult wizard being able to teleport wherever they wished, for example. That only works if the world accounts for it, which it very much doesn't.

Hagrid is fat, but he's the most wholesome character in the book

Harry Potter was the first time I recall when I saw an online fandom where people treated "I like this media thing" with the same energy as a religion, which probably wasn't helped by actual religious groups beefing with it. I will forever associate it with people who fought viciously over fan couples/sites & LJs devoted to them and with people getting really pissed when I said JKR was a coward for not making Dumbledore's gayness actual text. (Everyone in the latter category owes me an apology, unless you're STILL cool with off-page "reveals" for queer characters.) I could & still do understand why so many people latched onto HP's world as kids, but I was in my 20s when the books came out, and the adult fandom were the ones that I saw, and they have always, at best, confused me. I dipped after the first book leaned hard into "these people are bad, and their badness is revealed by virtue of their looks" in a way that not even Roald Dahl did. I'm glad that Percy Jackson is still around, even if he did almost immediately cave to pressure to erase his off-page "this character is ace" reveal. Not gonna forget or forgive that, given how little we had at that point. At least Riordan is TRYING to be a decent influence, instead of swan diving into destructively vocal hatred.

Strong points here. I was one of those kids who escaped into the Harry Potter world. I would read them obsessively and part of me wants to give credit to the series for helping me to enjoy reading as much as I do today. But the truth is that I liked to read even before Harry Potter and now I wish that I had latched onto a different series. I think its house-system was actually a little damaging because it suggested that people were best when they box themselves into destined identities that played to their strengths. I don't want to just blame Harry Potter, but I think it made me rigid in my pre-teen and teenage years, where I had to maintain some image of who I was supposed to be and of those around me. At the same time, I was grappling (or more accurately avoiding) with discovering that my sexuality was gay. So there's a ton of stuff from that which isn't really fair to put on these books, but I guess I'm looking at it as an opportunity cost. I wish I had had escaped into a world that would have actually helped my development in real life, rather than Harry Potter which reinforced the idea that the system was right, that I needed to conform to it, and in my case, that meant that my sexuality was a bad thing. It seems odd to say all this when Harry Potter had such a big slash community, but I never took part in that, so I guess I missed out on that lol. I guess take the above with a grain of salt. I just started therapy about a year ago, in my early thirties, where I'm finally working on accepting myself. So maybe the lens I'm looking through aren't the most objective.

On the colonialism baked in to Harry Potter: years ago, I wrote a fanfic about the enforcement of the magical seclusion act (an agreement of European wizards somehow enforced on other societies... How, exactly, Joanne?) In it, a Russian wizard traveled to Central Asia to propose this idea to the magical community there. I drew on my knowledge of Central Asian cultural ideas about magical practice (for instance, using a knife instead of a wand.) In the story, the Russian emissary meets with an ancient mountain witch, who reveals to him, subtly, that she and other magic users, who are embedded in their community, will not withdraw from it, but rather are using spells to Confuddle Russian soldiers and imperial bureaucrats to make them think local magic is just "native superstition", playing on European racism to blind them to the truth. She also reminisces about a magic-using sister she had to fight and ultimately kill because she wanted to use their magic against the Russian invaders, and her sister knew that would touch off a war of extermination, because of that same racism. It makes me spitting mad, because that right there is better head-cannon on magical history than anything Rowling has ever written about anywhere that wasn't Britain (more like, anywhere that wasn't England and rural Fantasy Scotland.) AND SHE COULD HAVE DONE THIS! I mean, rather, *she* couldn't have done this, but she could have seen HP as a world she could have shared. Especially given the backing of a major international media conglomerate like Warner Brothers (pre-gutting-by-Zaslav, which may not have been necessary if they hadn't put a lot of their eggs in the HP basket, only to find it going rancid after less than a decade.) In another world, where Rowling understood and acknowledged her limits as a writer, she could have hired dozens of writers from other cultures and countries to write HP tie-in material localized for their markets. It would have deepened the lore in exactly the way fans craved, the way Pottermore seems to have been designed to do, but she couldn't get out of her own way. Instead, she busied herself suing fans for trying to publish this kind of tie-in themselves. She wouldn't share. It's the same reason the spin-off series movies suck, because she has let her ego get so out of hand that she won't collaborate or accept editors, and the result is boring, confusing mishmash of plot and characters written like fanfiction trying desperately to fit in references-for-references' sake, and as you note, complete stagnation of world-building and character growth, with arcs that are more-or-less circles, and literally no change to the status quo, like a Saturday morning cartoon from the '80s. I think partly she accomplished this slight-of-hand of making us think the books were deeper than they were, because she was still writing the books as we read them, still revealing secrets and twists and it all seemed to be building towards some grand statement of inclusivity and progressive values triumphing over staid conservatism and bigotry. That's the story *she told us* she was writing. But in the end, as you note, she wasn't writing incisive social critique about the need for change in order to grow. She was writing how the status quo is Just Fine, Actually, and we only need to get off our asses if there's a literal fascist movement threatening folks' comfort (comfort built on slavery and exploitation.) But only *she* knows who the fascists are, so the rest of us need to Shut Up. God, it is so painfully post-war BRITISH with a Capital B. The house-elves continue to be emblematic of this, because they are such a fumble that turn out to be crucial to the story in ways that expose her embarrassingly British colonial mindset. An American, even the most tone-deaf white American who believes in the Lost Cause and the White Man's Burden and all that trash, would have recognized that in the house-elves, they are writing an allegory to slavery and segregation, and even the most dimwitted American author would have recognized that parallels between house-elves being treated like that by magical society, who *is also treated like that by mundane society*, leading to the exact social malaise Rowling was trying to critique with the DeathEaters. The obvious social critique was just left sitting there with nothing to say, because Rowling is a coward who couldn't bring herself to write the truth even while exposing herself with her comfortable lies. Dobbie wasn't a typical elf, he was a weirdo! The elves Like It Actually, Shut Up About It, Hermione. It was such a curve we readers refused to believe she was serious right up until book 7 ended. There had to be some crucial change coming, some pivotal moment when house-elves triumphed and turned the tide against Voldemort, and proved, along with giants, centaurs, and other non-human magic users during the Battle of Hogwarts, that they could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with wizards and deserved to be equals in wizard society. A satisfying ending with lots of climax of the themes of social inclusion and multi-culturalism succeeding over bigotries. But she proved herself to be a vastly lesser writer than Le Guin, in the end, because she couldn't make any changes in her cozy little hierarchy. Humans on top, but benevolently, like Dumbledore, not meanly like Voldemort. The magical creatures were set-dressing in service of the human's story all along, because a colonial Brit writing in the imperial core is apparently incapable of recognizing White Man's Burden when she is literally writing it. And even Le Guin noted structural flaws in Earthsea and returned to it thirty years later to write three follow-ups on the female point-of-view, continuing the story of Tanar and making the entire series stronger, deeper, and more satisfying, not less. And Le Guin was a noted feminist writer when she wrote Earthsea to begin with! She is a great enough writer, a great enough person, to learn and grow over decades. Sadly, Rowling has proven, in both her writing and her TERF activism, to be capable of neither.

I think the reason this series is so popular is very simple. It is not written for people who will think about the intricacies and subtext. It is written as a very surface level form of entertainment. It was written and catered towards a younger audience and not scholars who will notice the finer details

The recommendation I often hear is the Discworld series.

I find it funny that my Potter phase ended right as Half Blood Prince's book came out I wasn't a fan of how more dreary and dire the tone was becoming and it just sucked out all the appeal of the setting for me Around the time, I got into a series called Bionicle, and I loved the novels, as that series progressed, it too had a tonal shift but it always had moments of levity and hopeful themes and morals that stayed with me after finishing each book Especially when it seemed like evil had won

i dont think harry potter was ever really as strong as nostalgia would like us to believe, but i cant help but feel similarly about the chronicles of narnia. CS lewis wasn't ever quite able to outdo his own first book in the series. i would love to hear your takes!

Treasure Island. Buck Rogers. Johnny quest. Star wars. Harry Potter. Isakai. Every generation has a story of being whisked away to be the hero. It is accessible, fun, easy, and not always particularly deep nor endlessly well crafted. It is the first elementary reader Of literature, and it is eternal and repetitive. It comes in like the tide and washes away to be replaced by the next wave.

I struggle with reading regular novels. One of my friend groups is doing a reading of the Percy Jackson series (pretty good series all things considered), but I struggle to remember some details and visualize it because I don't have much visual reference to make a detailed picture in my head (it's something that helps me read). I blame this on my ADHD/autism brain. It's why comic books are much easier for me to get into. What I'm saying is: I think that difficulty reading novels helped me avoid the Harry Potter books. I remember trying to read the first book in the fourth grade and I just struggled to connect with it. I didn't even watch the movies (still haven't to this day). It wasn't because of malice, but just indifference. Knowing what Rowling is like as a person (and as someone who has transgendered friends and a trans sister/gender non-conforming sibling), I've blacklisted the HP series. There's no way I can give that series an honest and fair look because all I'm gonna be thinking of is how this author wants people I care about dead just for being trans.

I first fell out of love with the series, strangely enough, due to RL Stine. He had a collection that had a Bram Stoker story in it, leading me down a road of Bloch, Matheson, Sloane, and King, and leading me to realize how shallow the Potter books were. That said, I still enjoy some content that is admittedly not the best (oh Warriors, my beloved), so I don't know how much I can say about this without being slightly hypocritical.

I'd like to suggest "the worst witch" I think you'll find there's a lot of fun to be had. It's a far better children's book, also about a magic school, with three friends, a fun and quirky headmaster, a cold but secretly caring potion professor, and lots of fun and at times scary adventures.

Of course, all of this surfaces now when people want to distance themselves from her views by devaluing her work.

I was squarely in the demographic age group for Harry Potter as it was coming out. I was also a capital-R Reader - any time not spent reading was time I resented. My favourite genres were Sci-Fi and Fantasy. I never owned the Harry Potter books. My younger brother did, and I would borrow them from him. My favourite series at the time was Animorphs and while I liked Harry Potter just fine, I could not figure out why everyone was going mad for it. To me it just... didn't stand out. It was like the Worst Witch, but with bits of Narnia and Roald Dahl thrown in. Thank you for validating my childhood confusion!

I’ve heard some HP fans try to claim that people are being too harsh on some of the magic in the series and to “Don’t think about it too hard.” To me, I don’t think this is a really good argument. Most fantasy series usually have some basic set rules or lore to their magic system. While Harry Potter does have some “rules”, they’re either way too vague or not well explained. Take transfiguration for example, wizards are just able to make animals from inanimate objects or vise-versa. This causes some questions to arise: Can it even think, or does it have to be trained to be an animal? If you Transfigure a bird into a safe or something, is that considered killing it?, Ron turned a rat into a tea cup and it still had fur and a tail, so is it still alive? ect. When you have some powerful spell or magic items, you have to at least explain more about than it just existing.

Kingsley is the only black character and he doesn't appear till the fifth book... Assuming you ignore Dean Thomas who appears in let me check... Every single book.

The only cred I've ever given HP is that the environment is extroardinarily imaginative, which is all a kid really needs. Child perceptions are massively different to adult ones, since you don't have a wealth of experiences to draw opinions on. As a kid, I loved the Narnia books. One scene that always stuck with me was in the Silver Chair when they dropped items into a pool that turned them to gold, and at the bottom there were statues that were obviously people who'd jumped into swim. However, having re-read the books a few years ago while in my 30's, that scene was barely more than a couple of paragraphs. The point being, kids imagination can fill in a massive amount of holes and make things seem bigger than they really are. In the case of HP, having read them for the first time as an adult, I loved the setting, but the rest seemed poor at best. I'm not so fussed about the equality stuff others get strung up on. Don't get me wrong, she's obviously a bigoted person, and her mockery of Muggles who are so obviously a standin for "poor people" was right out the door, but I don't think you necessarily need to be describing everybody's skin colour/sexual orientation to be inclusive. And I think any author could be forgiven for fumbling foreign details regarding how other wizarding schools work when clearly the story is meant to revolve around Hogwarts. But on the more fundamental storytelling issues, Harry was massively unlikable in that he basically whined about everything despite everybody around him just giving him free stuff. Boo-hoo, he has a bad upbringing, but he was the most pampered kid there, literally getting a fortune in inheritence right from the offset. I still smile at how he kept claiming he was only good at Quiddich, when he was riding around on a broom superior to everybody elses because his teachers kept buying them for him. The final scene of the first book is also massively funny, in how Dumbledore just dumps a ridiculous amount of points on Gryfindore because Harry is just so awesome, propelling them from last place to first, dethroning the evil Slytherin. Then the whole school cheers! Like, okay, nobody likes Slytherin, but how can Hufflepuff students be happy that they were third and are now relegated to last place just because wunderkid in Gryfindore is the Headmasters pet? But again, from a kid's perspective, if you're imaging yourself as Harry, who doesn't want to be made to feel like the specialist snowflake out there?

As a baby, I was reading the craziest most fucked up children's books possible (like Animorphs) and when everyone around me was screaming about how great and amazing Harry Potter was, I finally gave in and read it (because I got points for a school thing) and it was the most boring, generic thing possible. If it came out today, people would accuse it of being AI generated. Completely divorced from Rowling being a horrendous shitbag, it's still just a very bad X-Men knockoff. (There are many other series that have accused Rowling of ripping them off but I called it bad magic X-Men as a baby and it stuck.) Your initial point is that children's books didn't exist prior to Harry Potter. This is false. It just became popular to write children's books. There were a ton of massive series before Harry Potter but they weren't as rabid as Harry Potter fans. It's like how Pokemon wasn't the first monster capturing game but it blew up in popularity because of Pokemon.

I still agree with you but tbf, @16:00, the patil twins aren’t the only POC Harry interacts with on a side character basis- Dean Thomas literally lives in his dorm, and Angelina Johnson was on the Quidditch team with him and Lee Jordan is/was the twins best friend.. it’s still a little “my best friend’s friend is black” but it should be noted so your essay sounds familiar with the material you’re analyzing.

Describing or naming a cultural icon, be it a creature, deity, prophet, you name it... should NEVER be considered "disrespectful". Upholding someone's superstition isn't a form of respect. Participating in limitating knowledge as demanded by a religious authority, that's disrespect to everyone. The whole premise of asking that a name not be said is inherently fascist in nature. I know authoritarianism is not at the core of american indigenous traditions, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't question the specifics when they are imposed on us.

I‘m not white and I could still identify with the series even though there wasn’t a single character in there that looked like me. Stop focusing on looks. It’s the character that you can identify yourself with and what matters in the end. And what you said about Slytherin is not really true. Rowling made us realise through Harry and other protagonists that our prejudices about Slytherins are false in the last book through Snape‘s story. Also, so what if it’s Britain focused. She’s British. There’s thousands of blockbusters that only focus on the US. No one seems so be bothered by that! Of course the books aren’t perfect but it’s unfair that people are holding them to extremely high standards and picking it apart this way. Sure there are better works out there but it still helped so many people and gave them an amazing magical world. They’re just children’s books for God‘s sake.

I think a good counterpoint to Rowling is Terry Pratchetts' discworld, because even though the tone is different, that of satire, paraody, and comedy. The world is better explained and better built. Also, Pratchetts writing is also very British, but all of the various characters have nuances, different perspectives, and the ability to grow. Pratchett also questions the status que a lot as is sorta the point in satire.The series also has a wizard university, which is just fun and daft

I'm Indonesian and even if I'm not that much of a fan of Harry Potter series, I'm excited to see what the equivalent of magic school in Indonesia. Needless to say, I'm disappointed but not surprised. We're an immensely diverse group of people from different ethnicities, cultures and belief systems. Our view of 'magic' differs as well, as we're not a monolith. Majority viewed it as working with demons and spirits, more akin to shamanic magics, but even that differs from culture to culture. To say that our fictional wizarding society need to go to one place in Indonesia is insane, let alone to tell us we need to go out of country to 'properly learn' (weirdly colonial if you think about it). And after I've read people grievances from different countries, I guess Just Kidding Rowling is too lazy to even hire someone from that country.

You list so many things to read other than Harry Potter, but missed an important one: Discworld. The fact that J.K. Rowling took the title of "Best selling living fiction author" from Sir Pterry (GNU) was a travesty, and even as a kid when Harry Potter came out, and I read them, I found myself thinking "She doesn't deserve this."

The US and Canada share one magic school? Zeriously?!?!? When I did my worldbuilding for a Kids on Brooms campaign, I had _multiple_ schools in the USA - one for each region of the country. (My campaign was set in the magic school for the Southeastern United States. That means, we not only would not see any students form Ontaria - we also would not see any students from Massachusets, California, even Texas.)

"Oh no I didn't realize there would be messed up implications" That seems like it's pretty typical for Harry Potter/JK Rowling.

close your eyes and it's like Alan Alda has a channel!

I take issue with your criticism that Harry Potter is too British-Centric. Its a series about a boarding school in Scotland. The fact that most of story revolves around the happenings of a boarding school in Scotland is hardly a flaw, and definitely not imperialism. The fact that the rest of the wizarding world doesn't get involved is hardly British Imperialism either. International relations between wizarding communities does not need to be a plot-point in a story aimed at children about a teenage British wizard fighting an evil British wizard. I also have a problem with the claim that there are no consequences for Harry, or that him pulling through and managing to succeed in life is somehow a flaw in his character or the writing. He is traumatised by Cedric Digory's death and spends most of Order of the Phoenix as a political outcast while grappling with his trauma. The fact that he comes out of his hardships more mature and more capable of dealing with his struggles is not a problem. I have a similar problem with your critic of the status quo not changing as I do with critic of the story being too British centric. The story ends with the main characters at the age of seventeen. They have been through loads already. The fact that they aren't super politically active is not a problem. Apart from the fact that not being a super politically opinionated seventeen year old is hardly an inherent flaw in a person as you seem to argue, they are also only seventeen. They haven't had a chance to do much in the way reforming the wizarding world. As a personal aside I find that focusing too much on the nonsensical worldbuilding feels a bit disingenuous. It was written to be an escape for young teenagers. Also J.K. Rowling not understanding literature on the same level as authors like Steven King seems irrelevant to the question of the quality of the work itself. Regardless of whether you think the series is good or not, an artists education and knowledge is irrelevant to the quality of the work itself.

The Earthsea magic system is very close to the Sufi Islam concept of God's true name. In Sufism, God is known to have 100 names - 99 of them are known to us but one of them is a name so "true" in essence, that when prayed to, it is guaranteed that God will answer. So in a sense, knowing God's true name would afford a Sufi unlimited magical power - however we don't see people wielding it because the person who is entrusted with the true name of God would be too wise to ever use it

18:41 he starts to become a better person after he’s attacked by dementors. He lost weight before that incident. It’s in no way tied.

- JKR is a bigot and a narcissist. - JKR is also a centrist. Outside of her exceptional committed to transphobia, she holds many entirely normal neoliberal beliefs and if you notice contradictions in the ideology of her work, congrats, you're a progressive. The world of Harry Potter is the world of a centrist neoliberal institutionalist. Rowling is capable of understanding that the bad thing is bad, but cannot take the next step of "the systems that perpetrate are the bad thing must be changed to stop the bad thing". That's how centrists think. I'm not shocked by that, most people I know are neoliberals/centrists. - The Harry Potter books were ultimately still entertaining fantasy stories. We wouldn't be having this discussion if people didn't love them and weren't struggling with the implications of being a fan of something that is so highly associated with an awful person as if a transitive property exists that makes you complicit in systems of prejudice and oppression because you enjoyed a novel that had nothing to do with that issue at all. I understand being do put off by JKR that you don't want to give her the win of having written good books. But I also remember shortly after 2016 there was a bump of people overrating this books somewhat because of the anti-fascism that was VERY basic in the 1990s, but suddenly more relevant after Trump and Brexit. For me, Rowling discourse has tainted my ability to return to Harry Potter without thinking of the controversy. It's just not possible for me to engage with the material the same way anymore ... but like Ender's Game before it, the author's real world awfulness can't go back in time and change my original impressions.

The problem with the Harry Potter series is that the worldbuilding has some foundational flaws. Rowling is great at writting characters, but she really fumbled the bag in making her world make sense. In fact it makes *less* sense the more you dissect it. The magic in the series is wild and creative, but it also has no rules outside of what the plot immediately demands. Like how the implications of memory altering magic is never adressed, how the limits and conditions of even simple spells are never explained or glossed over, how Avada Kadavra is just straight up the *GUN* spell etc

Honestly, I don't really like the Harry Potter books that much anymore, but I love the world as a mechanism for fanfiction authors to take and mold their own versions of it. The fandom and fanon around the world of Harry Potter is what I love.

I already watched like 4 Breadtube essays that says no, Owl House will age better and be appreciated by future generations unlike Wizard Cop

Honestly, Harry Potter was amazing in context. It came out at the right time and the series aged with its target fans. And Mr. Bloom's opinions are honestly poison. As a kids book there being depth is far less important than just catching the kids' attention, hopefully enticing them to read better books. Its the gateway drug of the reading world, if you will.

Rowling grew up and lived in an affluent and peaceful society. She may have experienced financial trouble, but it was in a rich world where even the poor can sit in a coffee shop and write stories. Unlike Tolkien, she's never experienced war or real hardship. She doesn't suffer from combat PTSD nor I suspect does she know someone who does. There may be other trauma in her life, but the idea that there is a cost -- a very personal cost -- to righting the world is not in her vocabulary. So, when Harry finishes with Voldemort -- everything is good.

When I fear that any future book I want to publish doesn’t sell because of technical writing mistakes I might make, I just think about Harry Potter and my fear is drastically reduced

People forget that barely 10 years have passed since the actions of Voldemort and even Snape is barely 30 in book one. The movies in a way reinforce the "no change, utter stasis" because of the actors that portrayed the characters. Old. Respectable. Middle-aged. For kids, people who are immutable and stuck where they are. No change.

That one Hoshii No Kirby episode is a self-fufilling prophecy about imposter syndrome. Write a book about wizards once, get destroyed by your own ego. Not to mention that a book like the Harry Potter series already existend in the DC back catalog in the Sandman comics which adds to the devastating imposter syndrome.

They're good, maybe even very good. Hard to call them "great" or "masterpieces" once you've...grown up...

There is something great about the books that give them mass appeal, regardless of the flaws of the author. The books are not perfect, but trying to retcon history and say they were never good in the first place, is cognitive distortion or flat out disingenuous.