As someone who grew up on HP, there are way better books in the same genre out there anyway. The hype of Harry Potter is all just marketing from Warner Bros (they own most of the rights on merchandise).
If you want an actually good children’s/YA story about a young person learning magic and becoming the hero, try the Tiffany Aching subseries of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. They are much better written than HP.
Also, "A Wizard of Earthsea" by Ursula Le Guin.
Such a good recommendation. Love that series and author!
Since we're on the topic; what irked me the most about HP is that it feels like a glorification of the aristocracy.
The very idea that individuals born from great families are destined to influence the course of the world while the plebs rot in helpless ignorance is basically what's wrong with the world. The magic school is clearly an allegory of these fucking ancient private colleges you get to go to if you're born with status. The whole setup is a privilege fantasy.
This is especially grand considering actual witchcraft was a way to frame, demonize and ultimately neutralize ordinary women's knowledge and influence, for the sake of tightening the clergy and the nobility's grip on the layperson.
That's a problem with many "choosen one" stories, see Star Wars. Only someone coming from the right bloodline can change things, everyone else is just an accessory.
Of course HP takes this to eleven, after all it traces actual British society of recent and past times.
Don't even pirate it!
Literally never bought anything Harry Potter or from JK (my parents read me the books and took me to see 2 or 3 of the films idk) and I'm super glad. JK Rowling sucks and tbh Harry Potter is mid af
trans rights are human rights ❤️ 🤘
The thing with boycotts is that it's such an online thing. You can proclaim a product or an author the product funds to be problematic morally, call to boycott it to support some cause, and most people are indeed going to join the boycott then post about it on social media, do the moral song-and-dance to join the cause.
In reality, the vast majority of those people aren't invested in the product or the world and wouldn't have bought anything from it, boycott or not. It's much harder to say no to things when you're actually invested into them, meaning boycotts aren't likely to influence those people. With that in mind, you now have a bunch of free advertisement for the product in a sense that it won't leave the public consciousness, a bunch of people not interested in the product doing their "activism" and a bunch of fans of the product fighting the boycotters (as seen with Hogwarts Legacy for instance).
I haven't read or watched or played a single product from JK Rowling's catalogue, but I've seen this happen time and time again with other media or companies such as the infamous Blizzard.
Not me. I own the books and I loved them. Very relatable, among other things. I very much looked forward to a new video game of the series, but the harmful rhetoric of Rowling's post easily outweighed my personal interest. I'd have bought Hogwarts Legacy but now I wouldn't even want to "download" it. Same with Blizzard's performative Overwatch Pride event that was not available for the countries that need it most. That caused me, a longtime Overwatch player, to uninstall the game for good.
Harry Potter’s books lost my interest after I found about JK Rowling’s garbage character.
Harry Potter and the Transphobic Shrew
was this made by chipflake, or was his characters just superimposed onto it by a third party?
https://bsky.app/profile/chipflake.com/post/3lqmfnpoqcs22 It was made by him, I found it on a few of his socials
That was literally my first thought. Really wasn't expecting to see chipflake here of all places.
Most of the people talking about Harry Potter and perpetuating its relevancy are trans people ironically
How do you figure that?
Nope it’s the average person still financially supporting JK Rowling by watching Fantastic Beasts and playing Hogwarts Legacy. We’re boycotting that stuff.
I don't even think the average person plays Minecraft, the most popular game ever.
Tell that to all the potter head tragics who are definitely members of Hufflepuff and not in gryphindor.
(Nothing pisses them off more than telling them they give off big Hufflepuff energy)
Ironically it's my trans sister that has had the most trouble with this. I love her to bits but I don't know how her brain works sometimes.
While I get the desire for escapism, I've never understood how the topic of magic had such a strong appeal to so many, anyway. I want an escape that might actually happen. Everyone should know that magic isn't real, and it's at best just science you don't understand. At worst it's just lies, misdirection, and slight-of-hand - the preference for which so many people have is what's ruining everything in the real world as we speak.
You're totally entitled to prefer stories and worlds that are grounded in realism - others enjoy reading stories that are flying high in fantasy far from the places we could ever hope to explore in our universe or anything that follows its rules. Absolutely not a defense of harry potter for what its worth, fuck jkr and everything she makes. But there's such a wealth of stories to be told that don't follow our rules, and many magic systems do follow hard and fast rules, they just don't happen to be the ones we follow in our world.
Just to be clear, you won't read things like T.H. White's The Once and Future King?
I get the hate for Rowling, and I'm old enough that I grew up on Narnia instead. I never read Rowling's books, given that I was an adult, but I lived with a woman a decade younger for a time, and she was all about Harry Potter, so I slogged through all of the movies. Great acting, good production values, but I had a hard time figuring out why to care.
Worth noting, though, is that as a kid, I had no idea when the first two books were read to me in bed that C.S. Lewis was a Christian apologist. I started reading from there. I'll frankly take someone who seems to have espoused the actual teachings of Jesus over a TERF any day.
I will say that Lewis helped get me through a rough patch via Mere Christianity as an adult suffering my first marriage falling apart ... while I remain an atheist, he made compelling arguments. Rowling really has nothing of substance to say through her works.
