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People got into Gaiman at an older age than they got into HP. So HP is more deeply ingrained
Yeah, I don't know, I read a lot of good books as a kid/teenager, and I didn't become obsessed with any of them as an adult.
At 13, I read Ender's Game and was absolutely obsessed. Read a ton of other OSC books at that age and it took me decades to rid myself of all the veiled mormon morality in his books.
As an adult, I never had one hesitation about disavowing him. I re-read the Ender saga a few years back to see how it held up (it didn't hold a candle to my teen-self's impression), but I had no problem not paying for new copies of anything that would pay OSC.
Classic must read:
The saddest thing about this story you’ve told (which is very familiar to me) is that OSC, while heavily influenced by his Mormonism, didn’t need to be the homophobe he is.
Brandon Sanderson, who is also a Mormon, has multiple LGBT characters. They are mostly supporting roles so far, but they’re there. He even has an ace character (though mentioning who might be a spoiler for some). Then there are the Kandra, who change gender at whim. And there’s the Reshi king who was born female, always identified as a king and not a queen, and when he gained Radiant powers his body naturally reformed male to reflect his self-image (Investiture naturally reshaping a highly Invested physical form to fit the person’s self-image was well-established already, I think most clearly spelled out in Warbreaker but has had a few examples in Stormlight Archive).
Anyway my point is we can act like Orson Scott Card is a homophobe because of his religion, and certainly that probably helped inform his views, but anyone as traveled and informed as he is should have had those views challenged enough to rethink them by now.
I haven't read a lot of Sanderson, but I've read enough to sense that this difference is in true personal disposition.
Sanderson's drive seems to be more of wonder, curiosity and adventure, and the stories delve into morality and justice as a source of plot tension.
In contrast, I think OSC has always been more of a black-and-white thinker. I think his best stories have been ones where he is exploring a moral struggle or thought experiment. But at the end of the story, you can pull out what OSC has concluded morally about those characters - who is good, who is bad (and always has been), and maybe who is a necessary evil.
All of OSC's stories are about categorizing people, behaviors and decisions into 'should/should not' buckets. And I've just never gotten that sense from Sanderson's books.
This is a really good analysis. Thank you!
OSC was the first author I read who conveyed OCD on the page (the wood grain lines in Xenocide). Hard to completely disavow that.
To the kinds of people who never moved beyond children's books maybe
even as a kid i recognized HP as slop and it feels vindicating that society is finally catching up
the first movies are pretty decent, but i do not fathom how it continued past.. idk, the fourth? and then became a different series set in the same universe
like the setting is interesting but not that interesting, and it very much falls apart if you scrutinize it too close. It's basically just a theme park in story form: good atmosphere and some specific memorable bits, but it's only good if you go there for a few hours then leave and go on with your life and maybe revisit every few years.
It's beyond satisfying for me to as a child to see the books were badly made, and increasingly less edited, and now other people have had blinders removed with improved media analysis and just growing up.