As a general rule, I don’t like fantasy fiction. My eyes gloss over the moment someone recommends a book or movie with wizards and glowing orbs on the cover. Even something as popular as Lord of the Rings doesn’t do it for me. For whatever reason I just can’t get into it.
And yet I love the Harry Potter series. Why? They’re undoubtedly fantasy novels, complete with witches, wizards, magic spells, dragons, giants, and so on. But with those books, somehow, I don’t mind - I even like it. It just feels different somehow.
Is this just me, or has anyone else had the same experience? I’m guessing other people must have - fantasy is still a pretty niche genre and the HP books were so massively popular among all types of people. So…why? Is there something intrinsically different in them from most other fantasy novels? Are they just the exception that proves the rule??
Harry Potter is certainly different from other fantasy series in many ways. For one thing, it’s still placed in modern Earth. (As Muggles, we just don’t know magic is real.) For another thing, it follows kids through school, so the daily activities of the characters are still rooted in things we’re very familiar with as readers.
The more typical fantasy literature out there tends to follow heroes on grand quests - think Lord of the Rings and Wheel of Time for starters. It’s not our world, and they’re not doing things we’re familiar with.
I’m not a fantasy expert, but it sounds like your first paragraph is describing “low fantasy” and your second is describing “high fantasy”, as opposed to “not fantasy” and “fantasy” (as you appear to intend).
Because magic in the Potter universe is not used as a deus ex machina or an easy solution to a plot problem. Rowling plays fair, for the most part. Yes, there’s magic, but it operates in accordance with the logic of the plot.
Rowling, from the beginning of the series, has often talked about how she is a huge fan of boarding school stories, which is a very specific genre in the UK, and maybe more of a niche interest in the US. I’ve always loved how the “feel” of Harry Potter is very often much more similar to the boarding school tradition – it’s about redefining yourself in a new environment, making decisions on your own, making friends, making enemies – often over petty stuff, school sports, meeting your friends’ families over the holidays … even something which is sometimes criticized about the HP books, that Harry gets very little help (relatively) from the adults in his life, is very consistent with the boarding school book genre.
Obviously, the plot of the books is dependent upon the reader buying into the idea of magic, but you actually don’t have to understand very much about how the magic works to enjoy the books fully. It’s probably more important to be invested in the interpersonal relationships shown in the book, which are very similar to the relationships we have in the real world. I think all good fantasy does this to some extent - functions as a stand-in for situations in our world - but HP is very, very anchored in the real world when it comes to how people and systems relate to each other. It’s not even a metaphor, it just IS. For example, a lot of fantasy settings are ruled by a king with absolute authority, which most of us don’t have any first-hand experience with. HP’s wizarding world is ruled over by an annoying bureaucracy.
There are 50 zillion fantasy books for which this is true.
Potter read like young adult fantasy to me. It’s not the same type of thing as Tolkien; instead it’s very much in the kids-book tradition. The stuff I read 50 or more years ago had the same feel regardless of the underlying genre - mystery, science fiction, historical, sports. YA books feel like YA books.
The problem is more with Tolkien than anything else. Half the writers in the world want to imitate him (well, his sales numbers). But the fantasy world was a huge and disparate universe before the Tolkien clones took over. Any individual fantasy felt more different from any other than any individual science fiction work felt different from the others. There are lots and lots of people writing real, non-Tolkien fantasy and a search will bring up many threads in which people list their favorites.
An alternative point of view: it’s because the magic in Harry Potter is kind of bullshit. It’s really a story about how these kids get along with each other and grow up, with a lot of mysterious twists and turns along the way. I enjoyed the books very very much, mind you, but with the hilariously-delivered magic spells and the Quidditch and the pumpkin juice it’s so silly as to be cartoonish. I think that really might be it; the supernatural elements are so goofy and superficial that they don’t trip any kind of sensitivity you might have to flowery fantasy prose or world-building.
Maybe **Rodgers01 **hasn’t had much experience with “low fantasy,” and might enjoy some other examples. Might I recommend Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden novels, or Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories (“Murder and Magic,” a collection of four novellas, and “Too Many Magicians,” a full-length novel). Both are detective series of a sort, involving murder investigations in worlds where magic works. (The world of the Dresden novels is close to our own, but the Darcy stories have more of a Victorian feel.)
I’m sorry, I really enjoyed the HP novels, but Rowling is the QUEEN of deus ex. In virtually every book in the series, the good guys are saved by some plot development that’s unexpected, usually could not have been reasonably predicted by the reader, and is only explained afterwards. Pretty much the definition of deus ex machina.
Book 1: Oh wait, Quirrel burns up when he touches you!
Book 4: Oh, did I mention that when two wands with the same core cast against each other, crazy shit happens? Priori incantatem, bitches.
Book 7: *We need to destroy the diadem of Rowena Ravenclaw, one of the Horcruxes! But we don’t have anything powerful enough to do that! It takes basilisk venom or something similarly potent. *“Oh wait,” says freaking Crabbe, heretofore a nonverbal meathead for 6.5 books, “I’ll cast Fiendfyre, a spell never mentioned once in the books before now, a spell Dumbledore himself didn’t think to use when he tried to destroy a Horcrux. But I know it!” :dubious:
I certainly did not divide things between fantasy and not fantasy - I said “other fantasy” and “typical fantasy.”
You’re right that the terms low fantasy and high fantasy are the better descriptors of the genres. Part of the reason I didn’t use those terms is that I’m not sure if the OP’s distinction is based on that division. It could also be that the OP is familiar with low fantasy and still finds HP interesting in a way that other low fantasy isn’t. For example, maybe the OP just really likes books about life in school and would find a history of Gandalf’s college years to be a fascinating read.
It’s in the movie too. He also says they “can carry immensely heavy loads”, foreshadowing how Harry, Ron & Lockhart get out of the Chamber. What an oddly specifically useful animal!
How about this? The reader is immersed into the magical world of Hogwarts along with Harry. So instead of a lot of exposition explaining what the magic is, we just learn about it along with Harry.
I agree that the reason is that they are so well anchored in the real world, to the extent that a kid could imagine glimpsing some wizarding if she looks hard enough. The other fantasies close to the real world these days seem to be infested with vampires and other vermin, and are their own genre at this point.
A lot of fantasy in Unknown was tied to the real world or a parallel version of it, like Heinlein’s Magic, Inc.
