First of all I want to say that this is not meant as a thread to bash Harry Potter. Everyone is free to love what they love, and I certainly love things that other people would find strange. I know there have been threads before on “Why do people like X?” that are either stealth bashing threads, or a way to seem above something, and I’m definitely not too good for Harry Potter.
I was in a group where we would get together and watch Game of Thrones this season. Once the season was over, we wanted to keep getting together even if not every Sunday, and we decided on a book club, and then we decided that we’d go through the Harry Potter books. Most of the group had read the books at least once before, some of the people multiple times. I’d seen all the movies but not read any of the books. I’ve read through the first three books now, and while I’ve enjoyed them and they are fine, I don’t quite understand why they are so huge. I liked all three, but didn’t love them, and just don’t see the spark that made other people fall in love. The biggest Harry Potter nerd in the book club is Lisa, and she’s said multiple times about how the third book was her absolute favorite, and while it was fine I don’t see it standing out too much from the other two.
Did the books just come along at the right time and fill a niche that no one else realized needed filling? Star Wars seems like a good comparison, in which those movies came along at the right time and filled a need.
I thought maybe that I’m just too old reading the books for the first time, and that if the first book had come out when I was in 5th grade I would have maybe fallen in love. But even then I’m not sure, I think I might have just read it and enjoyed it and immediately forgotten it like so many other books I got at the Scholastic Book Fair. And I do know other people older than me who absolutely love Harry Potter who would have had to start reading them when they were in high school or older so it’s not just the age.
I can also somewhat see the appeal of the magical world and wanting to live there, but the world doesn’t seem that well sketched out. I know the stories are focused on Harry Potter and him being at Hogwarts, but I still can’t understand how the rest of the wizarding world functions, and what jobs are available to students when they graduate, or how the wizarding world coexists with muggles but has so little understanding.
So, if anyone can try to explain the overwhelming popularity of Harry Potter, either the big picture or why you love the stories so much, I’d love to hear it. There are a lot of things that are beloved that I can understand the appeal of even if I don’t love it, but Harry Potter isn’t just loved, he’s become an industry with theme parks and everything.
It came out at just the right time, right publisher, etc. Plus, at least for the first book:
He’s an outsider kid who thinks he’s nothing, then finds out he’s got really magical parents (though dead), and is whisked away to a fabulous fun place where he has real friends and adventures!
There’s a lot of humor and mischief and kids getting away with stuff.
The background world has just enough detail to enthrall without overwhelm. This allows for fairly successful expansion in the later books
There’s a wonderful villain. No, not Voldemort. Snape!
I read the first three books at the same time when I was in 5th or 6th grade I think?
And I read each subsequent book right as they came out. I aged the same pace as Harry. Including the final book coming out when both and and I were 17.
The books are for people of my generation and as I matured, so did Harry.
When we were both young (so to speak) our problems were light and airy. Making new friends, trying to find out who you are and things like that.
Then the books got more serious as did my life. I had to deal with girls, bullies high expectations of myself thrown on me by others that I didn’t want nor could possibly live up to.
It was a bit of a mirror into my life and my childhood. I’m by no means as obsessed as some people are, not by a long shot, but I loved the books because it was written specifically for me (or so it felt).
I liked other fairy tales better. People seemed really enamored of the spells. I remember people sending video taped questions to Larry King Live for JK Rowling to answer. The spells, and where they came from, seemed to really resonate with people.
I think an important part is the mischievous rule breaking. We all want to live in a world where OSHA standards, nay, common sense standards of safety just don’t have to apply.
I think the “houses” matches people’s ideal of the college fraternity. So that sticks with people outside the British public school system, even as they become older.
I thoroughly enjoyed the Potter books, but this part is simply not true. The OP already highlighted some of the key problems in Rowling’s world building. Tolkien she ain’t.
Brilliant books that got a lot better as they went. JK Rowling didn’t just maintain good quality, she improved and became an excellent writer a long the way.
Yeah, as world-builders go Rowling is pretty lackluster. The world of the contemporary-to-HP-youth-fantasy-series His Dark Materials is much better realized.
Philip Pullman is a better writer than Rowling, but of course being a better writer doesn’t make one more popular. It is all about capturing the public imagination and for whatever reason Rowling hit the nail on the head for a larger segment of the public. Why I dunno, but she certainly had the winning formula.
1-3 make sense, I can understand the appeal of all that.
4 doesn’t make as much sense. I remember liking Snape from the movies, but I’m not sure how much that was the character and how much that was Alan Rickman. So far in the books he hasn’t seemed like a compelling villain. He’s an obstacle to the kids, but usually not too difficult to overcome. And a lot of his villainy towards the kids are taking points away, giving hard assignments, or tattling to Dumbledore. I know that it ends up that he’s a double agent or something like that for Voldemort, and that’s interesting but it hasn’t come up in the books yet. In the third book he wanted Sirius Black and Remus Lupin to go to Azkaban basically because Black played a (very dangerous and unwise) prank on him and because Lupin is a werewolf.
I guess it depends on what you mean by being written down to. Because so far the only ones who can save the day are the main kids, and basically all the adults are evil or somewhat incompetent. It feels a bit like a pandering to kids’ fantasies, since kids feel so out of control of their lives so often. Which is totally fine, I know I read books like that when I was young, it’s just surprising to me that it would be so popular with adults.
This makes sense to me. I was 14 years old and in 9th grade when the first book came out. I’m sure even if you had given it to me I wouldn’t have read it, I would have thought it was too childish. But my friend Lisa who is a huge fan would have been in the 3rd or 4th grade, I can understand how she would have been able to get into it much easier. But I also have some friends like my friend Abby who is my age, or Maisie who is 2 years older, and they are both super big fans. I know there are others like them and older.
Do people love fantasy? It doesn’t seem like that fantasy is overall that popular of a genre, other than Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. There are a lot of people who love fantasy and are passionate about it, but I would guess that a very big percentage of people who love Harry Potter do not have any other fantasy series on their shelves.
And I just touched on how it’s not internally consistent, there are so many more things I could point out.
I like the book of the Hobbit, I read it at least twice when I was young, and the Lord of the Rings series at least once. I also read the Chronicles of Narnia books and loved them.
The spells are fun, but I guess people are just focusing on how you can do them at Hogwarts. Because if you go back to live with the muggles you can’t do magic. Or if you live in the wizard world you can do spells, but I don’t know what the wizard world consists of.
The houses are another thing that’s strange to me. We know most about Gryffindor, which makes sense since that’s what house the main characters are in. I know that Ravenclaw is the nerdy house and I don’t remember anything about Hufflepuff based on the books so far. And Slytherin is the evil house. I think in the first book it says that no wizard has gone bad except ones from Slytherin (although everyone thinks that Sirius Black is one of the worst wizards ever). I would think after a while people would start monitoring Slytherin more carefully. Or modify the curriculum and try to teach Slytherin how to use their ambition and cunning for good. It would have improved things a lot if there was a Slytherin kid who was trying to be student body president or whatever wizard/British equivalent there is, or was trying to start up a business selling chocolate frogs to students, instead of all the Slytherin kids we see being some sort of bully or jerk.
Also, maybe I would relate to the house stuff more if I had been in a sorority, but I wasn’t in one and had no desire to be in one. I don’t know if the house stuff is something that is a huge draw for people, but maybe it is.
I’ve heard that, and I’m expecting it to get better as it goes along. But as I said in the OP, I was also told that the third book was so much better than the first two, and I don’t see it. They are all fine, decent books, but I just don’t see why they are some of the biggest books ever. The books sold so much that the New York Times had to create separate lists for children’s books.
William Goldman famously wrote about the motion picture industry that “Nobody knows anything” when it comes to what will be a hit. I’m sure the publishing industry would be happy to know exactly what made the Harry Potter series so successful so they could reliably duplicate this success, but they don’t. No one does.
Looking at Wikipedia’s list of bestselling books, I’d say that if one was trying to engineer a mega-bestseller then a children’s book with crossover appeal for adults would be a smart way to go. A lot of the books on the list fit that description, and such a book is going to have a broader audience than something primarily enjoyed by only either kids or adults. But there are plenty of children’s books, even very good and/or popular ones, that never gain much of an adult readership.
One thing that’s not unique to the HP books but not terribly common either is that it’s a long-ish children’s series that, as Sir T-Cups pointed out, wasn’t frozen at the same reading level throughout and had a hero who grew up and dealt with more complicated problems as the series progressed. This probably helped hold the interest of child readers as they grew up as well as drawing in adult readers. IMHO the series also got progressively better for at least the first few books, which definitely encouraged me to keep reading even though I actually didn’t think the later books were as good.
Once the Harry Potter books were already popular then their success bred further success – a lot of people wanted to read these books they were hearing so much buzz about. Since most children’s books are actually purchased for children by adults, the buzz factor may be an even bigger deal for children’s titles than adult titles. Grandma may have no idea what little Timmy and Susie actually like to read, if they even *do *like to read, but you’d have to have been living under a rock not to have heard that the Harry Potter series was popular with kids. The popularity of the books also led to the movie adaptations, which were also successful (not a guarantee even for adaptations of popular books – again, nobody knows anything) and helped draw in a new audience and keep interest levels high during the long gaps between the later books in the series.
I’ll add that on that list of all-time bestsellers, it’s not the HP books that particularly stand out to me as needing explanation. I don’t want to hijack this thread so I won’t name names, but there are books on that list that I’d rank among the very worst I have ever read. While there are all-time bestsellers that I personally love and/or consider to be of great literary significance, there are also quite a few that I thought were fine but nothing special.
There was a big gap between the last really great fantasy series that was interesting and considered appropriate for tweens and teens and Harry Potter. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a really big one since Narnia. Maybe The Chronicles of Prydain, but those were finished in 1968, and for some reason I was the only one in my peer group who read them. The Song of the Lioness series came out in the 1980s, but never found as big a following as it deserved; it was handicapped at the time because publishers were convinced that only girls would read a series about a girl. The only reason I really got into fantasy was because my mom didn’t limit me to the kid’s section at the library. Because there just wasn’t much there; I had to go to the adults section to get my fix.
There was His Dark Materials (just before Harry Potter), but that was legitimately criticized as too dark for 8 year olds. There was Redwall, but that was boring and repetitive for 14 year olds. Harry Potter filled that middle school and junior high niche that was oversaturated, at the time, with quasi historical fiction and insipid romance novels.
Harry Potter pretty much single handedly made fantasy for kids cool again.
You know, it just hit me how much Harry Potter is like Star Wars. Rowling has even been going Lucas online more recently, trying to patch up what she sees as plot holes, and adding details. Like the whole thing where she announced Dumbledore was gay. There was some subtext that could be interpreted that way in the later books, so it wasn’t totally out of left field, but it really would’ve been nice if that were the text instead of some extratextual authorial fiat.
Rowling, at least, is trying to use her creator powers for good rather than frivolous special effects and utterly nonsensical plot alterations that undermine the characters, but she likes tinkering in much the same way Lucas did before he sold the property.
This makes sense. They are good books, but it was also the right time and right place.
This makes sense, that it would stand out from other books that were around at the time if there weren’t many good fantasy books.
She does seem to tinker with adding extra details, in interviews or on Twitter. Enough so that if she released a revised version of the books in a few years I wouldn’t be too surprised.
Also like Lucas, the original story is expanding to be more of a franchise universe, with other stories happening in the same universe, with the Fantastical Beasts movie and inevitable sequels, and the stories about the American schools, and others stories I believe. But unlike Star Wars, Harry Potter has two theme parks.
I’ve seen it noted that it mirrors the pitch of the blockbuster X-MEN franchise: “Oh, hey, nobody told you? Yeah, you’re special; you can attend a private academy where you’ll learn how to use your amazing powers, and you’ll go on fantastic adventures in between hanging out with other people just like you. Say, did you ever feel like you didn’t fit in? That’s because you belong with the wonderful people.”