this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
680 points (86.6% liked)
Microblog Memes
8106 readers
3928 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Unpopular opinion coming, but fuck it. Harry Potter was never great, besides being set in the modern day it's very generic and the movies were mid. some people will worship whatever JK Rowling breathes on
It's alright but it's definitely got more popular than literally all the other coming of age teen fictions through sheer luck. And I read a lot of these as a kid so I know what I'm talking about.
I've also heard that she was immensely helped by translation because when her shit was translated she was already starting to get famous, so the publishers contracted their best, and apparently the originals are a lot less "well written" than e.g the french version. I personally never bothered to check because I have more interesting things to read.
Fun fact about this one : when my librarian mom brought the first volume of Harry Potter home, I remember she told me that it must be good because she had never heard of the author (and she was specoalized in kids literature so she knew a thing or two about children and teens book authors) but she knew the translator
i read that shit around 10th grade because it became fucking impossible to navigate anything in english class, since every other discussion related back to them because that was the only thing these cretins had ever read in their life or something.
they're fucking awful hack work.
the "plot" is razor thin and meanders most of the time, most of the length is filler, all the lessons beyond useless vagueries like "do the right thing" are awful things to impart to children, the worldbuilding is slapdash, the magic system tries to split the difference between whimsical and well-defined and is competent at neither, and the hero simply fails upward to the conclusion of his arc.
i said all of this back then and everyone to a person dismissed me as a "contrarian" and continued marvelling at the brilliance of this monumentally terrible book series.
if you love your kids you'll give them something better to read than fucking harry potter.