“John Boot” isn’t as impressed with Harry Potter as he’s supposed to be:
Why don’t kids notice that their heroes get everything handed to them on a levitating platter? Because, I guess, they think it’s really cool to imagine themselves riding a dragon as a huge building collapses all around them. A better question is why so many adults seem so intrigued by all things Harry, lining up next to eighth-graders for midnight showings. The answer is: Because as kids have gotten more and more grownup, adults have become children. Tech companies like Pixar and Google fill their offices with game rooms and cereal dispensers. Soon your office will have a 17-year-old guidance counselor on staff to advise you on how not to be so, like, ancient.
I haven’t seen one since (I think) the third one. I haven’t read any of the books. But then, I was just never into magic, except the kind provided by a sufficiently advanced technology.
[Update mid afternoon]
Some commentary on the movie patrons, from Laura Ingraham:
Unless you’ve been contacted by the film’s casting director, there is no reason for you ever to come to a movie in costume. We don’t think you’re cute. We don’t think you’re artistic. We do think you’re a nerd. And the moment you leave the protective company of the other crazy people at the cineplex, you look like a complete idiot. The robe and the wand are not working for you.
For the record, I have never been to a movie in a costume. I actually hate costumes (and Halloween, which seems to have evolved from a childrens’ holiday when I was a kid to an adult one, apparently as a result of many of my age cohorts never growing up). Of course, I have also never seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I take no small measure of pride in that, after all these years. I was completely put off it by the rabid fans.
[Saturday update]
I know, I probably shouldn’t give him the traffic, but once again Mark Whittington displays his endless talent for hyperbole (and inability to actually detect people’s emotions or read their minds, despite his continuous attempts), fantasizing that I am “heaping disdain” on Harry Potter. And that I’m doing so to “pretend to be cool.”
Never been impressed with Harry Potter, the passive good-boy that a woman imagines how little boys should be – staring at a vision of lost parents for hours (?!) who’s only noteworthy because he has a MacGuffin that guarantees the author several years of lucrative book deals. No thanks. Destiny is no substitute for ambition. Had “J.K.” been a little more honest and written a story about Harriet Potter, that would garner more respect, but possibly less cash, so I can hardly blame him/her/it.
What?
You didn’t like the LOTR trilogy?
I found the books charming and entertaining, but not really worth all the hype. The movies (the ones I’ve seen anyway) have so far been better than the books, as they cut out a lot of the extraneous padding with which each volume was increasingly filled. As for magic, well… it was integral to the plot, though if you ask me she played a bit fast and loose with her own rules. (Even in fantasy, you need to be consistent — if it’s dangerous to shape change in one chapter, it can’t then just be okay to do in another.)
Personally, I don’t get most fans of the genre’s apparent reason for being into fantasy. I’ve read commentary from “it’s a way to escape from our mundane lives” to “I wish I could do magic.” I’ve never felt that reading was an “escape” from anything — anyway, it never worked that way for me. And I’ve never wanted to be able to do magic, which most people seem to think of as having a special secret power over things that the mundane crowd doesn’t have. I think what I like best about fantasy novels is the quest aspect, since it involves travel and discovery. I’ve pretty much stopped reading it, though — I think it’s been mined dry, which a lot of the new fantasy novels, which all seem to be about elves having nervous breakdowns or something, demonstrate.
PS: Titus, I’m not sure why Rowling making her protagonist female would have been more “honest.” That sounds a bit like the stuff we’re always making fun of feminists for saying. Personally as a girl I like reading about boys doing things. I don’t need the main character of a novel to be like me to “relate” to the story.
I like well-done fantasy, The Lord of the Rings books being the obvious example of that. The Harry Potter books have some charm, but I felt that they really weren’t very well written and became increasingly long and uninteresting over the course of the series.
I’ve seen the first two films, which seemed like reasonable adaptations, and I think the movies (even the ones I haven’t seen) have been very well cast. But I just lost interest after a while. I probably wouldn’t have read all of the books except that I’ve got kids of my own and am a very fast reader.
That’s my point — little girls will happily read stories about little boy protagonists, but the converse is much less true. Again, the market decides, so I don’t fault her for that per se, but it wouldn’t be so glaring if Harry weren’t such a beta male. The situtation is exacerbated when the author inserts herself as the most assertive character of tween cadre — honestly, if you have to teleport yourself into your story to drag the main character kicking and screaming to his “desitiny”, the reader is getting roughly the same treatment.
It’s hard for me to accept the description of Harry getting victory handed to him on a silver platter when he’s spent most of books 5 and 6 fighting and losing the big battle at the conclusion of each. If that’s the impression he got from the latest movie, then it may have been adaptation decay.
Part of the problem is that people haven’t been exposed much to good science fiction, so they prefer fantasy. This is because (a) Hollywood sf is mostly done by people who don’t know what real sf is–no self-respecting sf writer would have a half-human, half-Vulcan hero, or would use a “parsec” as a unit of time; and (b) because when Hollywood takes an already-existing good sf story like Starship Troopers, it mangles it so badly that no other sf writer will let them near his work.
Hopefully this will change once modern animation makes it possible for people to make their own movies. I’d particularly like to see pretty much all the early Niven works made into CG animated films.
^^^ Feature film usually seems like the wrong format for SF. I’d rather see translations into mini-series (if they must).
Written SF can make a good movie, but generally you want to start with a novella rather than a novel.
I’ve been an SF&F fan since second grade, back in the early sixties, when I learned to read.
The HP books bore me and frustrate me, but then, I’m jaded by writers like Terry Pratchett who understand their medium, and use it to say interesting things.
I am, however, completely blown away by Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a parody fan fic that explores many of the problems of Rowling’s work. Better written and far smarter.
It’s not without flaws, and Yudkowsky has tapered off on writing new chapters, but it’s well worth reading.
I think I’ll go into Scottsdale and see Sarah Palin’s biopic.
For me, nothing could ever top The Eye of Argon. No matter how many times you’ve read parts of it, it still evokes the same sense of awe and wonderment at how bad writing can get.
“I am, however, completely blown away by Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a parody fan fic that explores many of the problems of Rowling’s work. Better written and far smarter.”
If Rowling was trying write smarter and well written, she would have been a failure.
But not everyone is trying to do the same thing- which is something Rowling repeatedly indicated- as in, it’s everything she said.
I have read all the Harry potter books, but I haven’t seen last movie yet.
I believe that first word ought to have been “especially.”
Readers will put up with sloppy little inconsistencies in a story about the world they themselves live in, because so much of what beggars belief in their everyday lives is undeniably true anyway.
But if you’re going to ask them to buy into a world where unicorns fly and princesses turn into ogres at sunset, you better have everything nailed down.
I thought the 5th book, “Order of the Phoenix” was great. I highly recommend it to Rand. It’s about a government trying to hide a crisis by forcing indoctrination of school children. It’s a Socialist’s wet dream exposed for the hideous plot it is.
You people have obviously never been a lonely unloved child, abused by guardians and or parents, who then gets taken to a world where he is able to live out his dreams.
That story is one that resonates deeply around the world.
LOTR is not good writing. “Why have 5 characters when you can have 55?!” Not to mention all the walking. Thanks Tolkien, back in your box.
And yes, unfortunately I have seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Once, never again. Similarly for Little Shop Of Horrors. And it’s not just because they’re musicals. The Barber of Seville or even Wicked are vastly more enjoyable.
Harry Potter is nothing more than the story of King Arthur and Merlin rolled into one. The stories that surround the book releases are much more interesting.. like the new abuses of copyright law that accompany just about every pre-release copy and the innovative way people feed spoilers to unwilling fans.
LOTR is the greatest work of fiction ever told. I ometimes find it hard to read other books because they pale in comparison. No other writer has made a fantasy world seem so real you can touch it.
Yep, Tolkein has a ton of characters in supporting roles…but he still pulls it off.
I’m laughing at the “adults” knocking a children’s story. You remind me of all the elites who knock a commercially successful movie because in their opinion the writing and acting sucked…wait.
Mike, uhhh.. it might be a great story with a great vision and at the same time be horrible *writing*. Random example: Atlas Shrugged.
I have a bit more to say on this subject but right now I’ll just say this to “informed source”: if you aren’t a spammer, then you are really pathetic if you think people should like a book you liked just because you had a bad childhood.
Not to mention that he doesn’t get to live out his dreams at all. He’s constantly bullied and prohibited from using his skills for his own purposes. In fact, I think Harry Potter is Hank Rearden.
Or Howard Roark from The Fountainhead.. but hey, it’s basically the same character.
I’ve never read any of the HP books. I’ve seen bits and pieces of the flicks when the rest of the family was watching. Having heard them all talk about the books, compare them to movies, complain about the differences, heard “…should have played THAT…”, it just seems SOOOOooooo juvenile to me.
I feel like I’m the new kid, at JRHS, I have NO idea what’s going on, because I don’t know who’s who, when the folks around me are talking about who did what to who(m), when and where. Don’t get me wrong, these are intelligent, educated people, so it’s not like Valley Girl, OMG kinda stuff.
But it hits my ‘nerves’ that way.
Part of the problem is that I’ve never been a fan of sword and sorcery, or fantasy anyway, I guess. I blame Robert Heinlein and that kid in “Red Planet”.
(the first book I ever read, that wasn’t classroom related)
I read “Glory Road”. It’s OK, but it’s the tail end of RAH’s writing to me.
little girls will happily read stories about little boy protagonists, but the converse is much less true.
You’ve never heard of Dorothy Gayle?
Well, the central message of the Harry Potter series is one even Rand agrees with.
Even in a world of magic, with dragons and flying broomsticks, not even the greatest wizards can’t make high-speed rail work.
The one, rarely used train just chugs along at a snail’s pace.
LOTR is the greatest work of fiction ever told
Perhaps. However, in order to give this declaration its proper weight of authority, I recommend appending it with the phrase “in my opinion.”
This is because (a) Hollywood sf is mostly done by people who don’t know what real sf is–no self-respecting sf writer would have a half-human, half-Vulcan hero, or would use a “parsec” as a unit of time;
I certainly won’t defend Star Wars as hard SF, but that complaint is a little unfair, given the fact that Luke Skywalker rolls his eyes at the parsec comment.
As for Spock, his character was a bit more believable in the original series when he was the one-of-a-kind product of a test-tube breeding experiment. (Possibly a very expensive experiment — according to Dorothy Fontana, Spock’s family was quite wealthy, as was Spock himself.) It became much more annoying in the movies and The Next Generation when every other character was a half-breed or quarter-breed. That was eventually explained (not too credibly) on the basis of common ancestry (directed panspermia).
Hopefully this will change once modern animation makes it possible for people to make their own movies. I’d particularly like to see pretty much all the early Niven works made into CG animated films.
I don’t think so. Although I generally prefer SF to fantasy, and I love animation, movies like Titan A.D. have left me cold. I’ve come to the conclusion that, for reasons I don’t fully understand, fantasy works better in the animation medium than SF does. (James Cameron’s over-rendered Avatar did nothing to change that opinion.)
I have a lot of hope for Pixar’s “John Carter of Mars,” but that’s as much fantasy as Star Wars is.
Of course, if Brad Bird were to do a hard SF movie, I’m sure my opinion would change swiftly.
LOTR is not good writing. “Why have 5 characters when you can have 55?!” Not to mention all the walking.
It’s not good writing unless it’s one one long high-speed chase?
Kids these days. 🙂
“Not to mention all the walking. ”
Those plucky little Hobbits rucked-up and got it done!
My examples of the best hard Sci-Fi movies are the original Terminator or the original Planet of the Apes or Blade Runner.
Too bad most good Sci-Fi is dystopian.
Oops.
Even in a world of magic, with dragons and flying broomsticks, not even the greatest wizards
can’tcan make high-speed rail work.I hate to admit this, but Hobbits are partly based on Kentucky hicks like me. One of Tolkien’s Oxford classmates was from Kentucky, and Tolkien couldn’t get enough of the crazy Kentucky stories and sayings he related. The guy’s parents would send him phonebooks from here listing names like Baggins.
So even though Tolkien accurately portrayed us as walking everywhere, he never explained why. It’s because all our cars are up on blocks.
OK, back for a bit before I need to go to bed (tomorrow is the 12-hour shift starting at 6am). Anyway…
I’m not going to get into the LOTR-sux-no-it-dunt scrim. That never ends happily. Moving on–
Titus, I don’t quite get what you are arguing. You never said why you think the fact that Rowling wrote a boy protagonist instead of a girl means she’s not being “honest.” Instead, you went off into a tangent about how girls will read about boys but boys won’t read about girls, which 1) is hardly Rowling’s fault, and 2) beside the point. All I can figure is you seem to think that her decision to make the main character male was made on the basis of how many readers she would get. All I can say is this is something you can’t exactly prove unless she comes out and says so. I think it rather more likely (and what few interviews with her I’ve bothered to read seem to support me), being that the character of the put-upon orphan boy who makes good after many adventures is a stock character of Western culture, that the Harry Potter character just came to her as a natural compendium of the stories she had heard and read all of her life. Maybe that seems “dishonest” to you; maybe you think she should have invented a more “original” character. Well, it’s certainly a theory I’ve encountered.
@Leland 1:45 pm: “I thought the 5th book, “Order of the Phoenix” was great.”
Didn’t read the book, but I did enjoy the movie.
Prisoner of Azkaban is pretty good, too, but Methods looks a bit more deeply into the ethics of the Dementors, and the prisoners themselves.
===
@Bill Maron 4:29 pm: “I’m laughing at the “adults” knocking a children’s story.”
Not that simple. I’ve read and enjoyed many children’s and “young adult” books. I don’t sneer at popular things just because they’re popular. And I can see that there’s something deep and solid behind the Potter stories, particularly the later ones.
But Rowling simply did not know enough about how to handle fantasy when she started, and there’s something about her writing that grates on me. She doesn’t know how to do good world-building; hers is just tacked together from bits and pieces.
Andrea, I would even doubt she had any number of readers in mind when she began the story. From what I’ve read, it sounds like she started like Richard Adams (Watership Down), generating children’s story for her own children and then becoming immersed in it. When that happens the main characters, setting, and many other story essentials are already established long before the author thinks they’ll have three readers, much less millions of them.
One more thing — re: Rocky Horror… well, I must say I don’t know what sort of “rabid fans” of the movie you encountered, Rand. When my friends and I used to go to the Coconut Grove Theater and watch the midnight show, it was considered just a fun thing to do. No one took it seriously — I mean, this was a movie where you were supposed to throw stuff at the screen. Yeah, there were people who dressed up, but they were part of the fun.
I guess you had to be there, and be my age (early 20s), and it was the 80s, before the internet or anything. I still remember we’d be sitting around bored and then “let’s go see Rocky Horror!” Why not. We’d pile in the car and drive to the Grove. I seem to remember only doing this in the summer — it would be hot and sticky even at midnight. (This was in Miami.) We’d line up with all the other half-drunken (and often otherwise — there was usually at least a whiff of a certain burning substance that wasn’t tobacco) patrons. Well I wasn’t drunk — usually I’d just get iced Red Zinger tea. Some people brought umbrellas to put up during the rain scene, and rice to throw during the wedding scene. The best part were the things people would say back at the film. If you’ve ever seen Mystery Science Theater it was like we were an entire audience of Joel and his robot friends. I can’t repeat anything here — a lot of it was ribald and definitely un-PC, but mostly it just won’t work out of context. Anyway, eventually we got older, quit going, and finally the theater closed or something. Seeing the movie by itself on tv never worked — the movie was amusing, but it was the audience participation that made it great.
But– you had to be there. If you weren’t, it didn’t make any sense.
“She doesn’t know how to do good world-building; hers is just tacked together from bits and pieces.”
This is one reason I love LOTR. Tolkein was obcessed with being consistant in his depiction of Middle-Earth. It was literally a project decades in the making before LOTR was finished in the mid-fifties. I
t’s genesis goes back to the trenches of WWI.
Der Schtumpy – I don’t class Heinlein’s Glory Road as either sword-and-sorcery or fantasy; it’s much more a story using Clarke’s Third Law as the basis, i.e., everything is consistent. It definitely presages the rest of his ’60s writing, in particular Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
For those looking for very rule-based fantasy, I recommend Larry Niven’s magic stories (the ones involving mana as the basis for how magic works). Very entertaining, as Niven usually is.
Don’t get me started on how movies almost invariably f**k up SF. The example of Starship Troopers has been brought up already, but just as bad was the butchering of Heinlein’s great paranoid ’50s story The Puppet Masters. Although Donald Sutherland was terrific as the Old Man…
Just saw Andrea’s comment about The Rocky Horror Picture Show – Andrea, you nailed it! Plus several of the songs are actually pretty damned good.
Oh okay, one more thing: Laura Ingraham is a prissy bore. I mean, lord knows I’ve mocked cosplayers in my time, but who died and made Miss Laura the queen? I mean, what business is it of hers what people dress up like? I will agree that the person who dressed up like J.K. Rowling was pretty bizarre. On the other hand, for most people dressing up as their favorite fictional characters is a harmless pastime. The fact that it seems to irritate busybodies of all stripes is only a mark in its favor if you ask me. I thought libertarians were all about being free to do whatever you like with your own time as long as it wasn’t hurting someone else. Frankly, I don’t understand people who watch professional sports and have no interest in them myself, but that doesn’t mean I mock those who do or think it should be banned.
Mike Puckett: Rowling wasn’t world building — she basically just added some things onto the real, contemporary world. I agree her handling of the wizarding-vs.muggle environments was a little slapdash.
Okay I guess I’ve got more: someone who says Harry Potter had “everything handed to him” hasn’t read the books. On the contrary, Harry Potter has had nothing handed to him except a place in his wizard school. Everything else he has to struggle for: from good grades (he’s not a very good student — he’s a typical teen who would rather get into scrapes and play sport than study), to trying to not get killed by followers of Voldemort. His home life is pretty wretched — his aunt and uncle are both afraid and ashamed of him and they treat him as much like crap as they can get away with. And did I mention he’s constantly under threat of death? Maybe you’re coming from a perspective of “oh, he’s got magical powers and gets to have all these adventures” — well, all I can say to that is… Well I don’t know what to say. I can’t think at that level of immaturity.
Another thing: Harry Potter as a “beta male.” FFS, he’s just a kid. Also, for a beta he’s pretty willing to fight. I’d say he’s closer to alpha. On the other hand, I’d like to flush the “alpha-beta” thing down the toilet of Western Civ. It’s a stupid, limiting way of categorizing boys and men. Can we at least keep it out of out literature?
cthulhu: let’s do the Time Warp again! Heh.
There’s this about LotR: There are passages I love to read out loud. There are scenes that are the best of their kind ever written. The saga of the Fellowship after Frodo leaves is just one of the best damn adventures ever written. The healing of Theodren and the casting out of Wormtongue. The Scouring of the Shire. Beautiful. “I pass the test.”
But Frodo, Sam, and Smeagol? Slog, slog, slog. I read it the first time and pretty much skip over it every time since.
Exception: the scene where they are captured by Faramir. He, too, passes the test, human that he is. I love that scene, but it got cut from movie, to the show’s detriment.
Just to beat this joke into the ground, the LOTR saga would have taken just a few days if the Hobbits had High Speed Rail.
Sure, I did. Right up there in comment numero uno. In English, even. I see no need to belabor the point with someone who has a completely different take.
ONOES-RLY? And here I was going to perform a multi-million dollar ten-year study in a parallel dimension to prove my point beyond a shadow of a doubt so I’d earn the right to post my unorthodox observations.
The entire Hobbit can be read well aloud — I’ve done so for my cousins when they were little. Tolkien’s command of English at the molecular, er, semantic level was his bailiwick, after all.
No, that was a job for heavy lift.
Haven’t read any of the Potter books and only seen parts of a couple movies but what struck me was the total lack of impact that any book previously written that contained the use of magic had on the creation of the Potter series.
Definitely written for kids who have no experience.
I don’t really want to do a whole lit crit on the use of magic but I could…
Speaking as someone in love with language, I can’t think of anyone whose writing is more elegant and evocative than Tolkien’s, although Whittaker Chambers gave him a real run for the money writing non-fiction. And who could forget Shagrat and Gorbag, Shelob, the entwives, Goldberry, any of those 55 other characters?
Harry Potter? I pass.
I read one or two HP books, to see what got my 10 year old so excited. I think Rowling did three brilliant things, which brought her her millions :
First, she made magic just a school subject, not something you need to be born with special powers to do, nor something you need to study in some fierce ascetic way, like Grasshopper studying kung fu in the shaolin temple. It’s just like algebra, something you can slog through to competence, even if you’re ordinary and your teacher doesn’t much like you.
Second, the secret academy, with the invitation a surprise. Instantly the child was hooked : I might get an invitation myself! It’s the equivalent of suddensuddenly learning your the long lost secret last living heir of King Arthur, which is how these stories used to start in the days when mysteries in your genealogy were more plausible.
Third, she made the magic
… (have I ever mentioned that trying to comment on TT using a smart phone is ugly?)
Anyway, the third brilliance was to make the magic goofy rather than deeply somber, a la Tolkien. Now every little silly thing a kid might do — might be magic!
I think all three ideas made it enchanting to loads of quite ordinary kids. After that, I don’t know that they cared what exact story she told. They just wanted to know what’s it like, in that world, at Hogwarts? The narrative almost doesn’t matter, which is good, because I agree it’s pretty weak.