[ SECRET POST #5306 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5306 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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02. [SPOILERS]




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03. [SPOILERS for the Tearling trilogy by Erika Johansen]




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04. [SPOILERS for Danganronpa V3]
















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05. [WARNING for animal death]



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06. [WARNING for discussion of transphobia]




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07. [WARNING for discussion of sexual harassment]














Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #759.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

01. https://i.imgur.com/ckdXd8W.jpg

Transcript by OP

[fscom]

there's a reason other books didn't take off like hp did.
"[x] was better than harry potter"
most likely, it's not. your hate of jkr is clouding your judgement.
your dislike of jkr is warranted, and there are issues with the books, but i dare you to read some of the other YA magical books around that time. poor writing + concepts. there was potential but most have a reason they didn't succeed as much.

[greghousesgf]

probably going to get yelled at for this but it's OK to think something else was better than Harry Potter....

[(Anonymous)]

There’s plenty. It gets a lot of reverence for being ‘good for its genre’, but as an adult, it’s just kind of okay. The ending definitely feels as phoned in as it did upon the first read. There’s better fantasy that I could have been reading at that age, and there’s better fantasy coming out now. OP’s secret feels more like they’re being overly defensive about still liking it, but that’s just me.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, it's okay. Besides, it's not like saying "something is better than Harry Potter" even means you're saying Harry Potter is bad or something.

[(Anonymous)]

She was a good writer but she wasn’t the final word on children’s literature. Being more popular doesn’t mean you’re better.

[(Anonymous)]

+1

[(Anonymous)]

Mm, even though I don't have any specific names off the top of my head, there were definitely YA books back then that were a lot better. "It's massively popular so it must be the best" really isn't a good argument; HP was good, don't get me wrong, but it was very... good to the common denominator, if that makes sense? It was good enough in so many aspects that it appealed to the widest possible base, instead of being excellent in any particular way that might alienate some subset of readers.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree. Despite the myriad ways the story is inconsistent and full of plot holes and theoretically could have been better/more sophisticated, there is still something utterly magical and rare about the way it just effortlessly came alive in the minds of so many millions of people.

Different stories are strong in different ways, and there are unquestionably ways in which HP is weak and other stories are strong. But if we're going to talk about the entirety of HP as a whole, then evaluating other texts against HP just never feels meaningful to me. It always just feels like an impossible comparison; apples to mandrake roots.

[(Anonymous)]

Umm, is this addressing a specific person or article? ‘Cause I’ve never liked Harry Potter and my dislike of it has nothing to do with the author. I just personally found it boring and can think of several books that are way better.

[(Anonymous)]

I absolutely agree! The storytelling hits just the right notes to appeal to the masses. And I think people forget that when HP was first published there weren’t that many choices for people to read. Libraries were disappearing left and right through the 90s and readers were primarily stuck with buying books. Barnes & Noble and Borders were opening seemingly everywhere but even those superstores only had maybe 150-200 titles for any genre. Waldenbooks, Daltons, and the other small places had even fewer. Once the first book got some press for being so popular, it was a given it would just grow.

[(Anonymous)]

I thought the books were only okay when I read them when they came out and I was like 10 at the time. The first lot were fun child-fantasy books, but the attempts to 'age them up' didn't work with various parts of the lore crumbling under trying to give the books more depth. The sorting house alone is just stupid as fuck beyond the first installments, because no nuance was added to that concept at all and it's basically the 'good/evil' marker with no complexity.

So no, it's not hate of JKR clouding my opinion, I just never thought they were amazing.

[(Anonymous)]

There's some that's better and a lot that's worse.

[(Anonymous)]

Eh, the writing isn't great.

There were some fun concepts, some of the characters were likeable and so on, but she's not at all a great writer and her worldbuilding is substandard.

I thought the same back when I was a fan (I grew out of them long before JK revealed herself to be a bigot), because as much as I liked the setting, the glaring plotholes and inconsistencies always bothered me.

[(Anonymous)]

I still haven't read past book 4 of that whole series!

[(Anonymous)]

I always wonder what exactly made Harry Potter so popular. The style is really basic, lends itself to a quick read, so that's good but I think the characters are right bland or annoying, and there are aspects of the plot you have to handwave for it to make sense. I've wondered if it's the house sorting, that kind of "Here, this is your identity: brave, bookish, soft or evil" mentality.

[caecilia]

marketing is a huge factor in any book's success

hp was boosted by some controversy

there are better books from the time period but also better is a matter of opinion so

yeah

[tabaqui]

Oooooooooor.....they just think it's better?
Or...it actually was better?

HP isn't the be-all, end-all of YA magical fantasy books, and you don't have 'hate' JKR to like other books over the HP series.

[(Anonymous)]

Um, Fifty Shades of Grey, Twilight, and The Da Vinci Code are all best-sellers. These are not the worst, by any stretch, but I wouldn't consider them good. People like them and they took off. There was something about them that resonated with people. That doesn't mean they were written better than contemporaries. It could have been character or concept or something else. Anyway, I'm not saying HP isn't good, but popularity isn't proof and you have to make sure you know how people mean better. Any comparison, because at least some subjectivity is present in all creative endeavors, is not going to be completely objective.

[(Anonymous)]

Earthsea is better.
Chrestomanci is better.
Young Wizards is better.
Wizard's Hall is better.

People have been saying all of that since long before JKR was well hated, and they are right.

Harry Potter does a good job of melding boarding school story tropes with British folklore and portal fantasy tropes (though Chrestomanci also did it really well...), and as a result the early books especially are really fun reads, and they definitely have more heart than a lot of the stuff that was shoved out to capitalize on their popularity, but, like, a lot of stuff is better, and the farther she got from her boarding school/fairy tale/portal fantasy pastiche, the less well it worked.

[(Anonymous)]

I see this a lot with Percy Jackson. As a fan of both series, I can say that Percy Jackson is leagues better in terms of the author listening to fans and correcting missteps in representation (and lack thereof) for marginalized and underrepresented groups. In terms of the storytelling, character depth, and character likability (and... lack thereof...) they're really consistently about the same quality. The writing style is very different (third-person semi-omniscient trying to sound like a proper storyteller vs. first-person or third-person limited trying to sound like the kid whose POV is being told) so if you have a preference there, that's just, well, a preference. Neither is better.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm much more bothered by all the reviews stating "Just like Harry Potter but ~better~". But that's on me, hoping to find a book that has a similar setting with better characters and plot, it's just not happening lol

[(Anonymous)]

At a certain point, the popularity of these books were less about their quality and more about the sense of community and discussion outside of it.

People didn't like Twilight for it's high quality but both its positive fans and its negative fans both found each other in them.

Popular doesn't mean good and that's ok.

[meadowphoenix]

I think it is actually very difficult to hit upon the sort of unique generality, the relatable specificity, that HP hits on because it's so contextual to a time and culture, but I think it's absolutely true that HP did better than other books at the time. I'm wary of suggesting that that is a skill or talent or a quality that should be valued in writing in of itself, mostly because I think it is just luck.

[dantesspirit]

Neil Gaiman, GRRM, Terry Pratchett, Robin Hobb, Guy Gavriel Kay, Margaret Weis, Patricia McKillip, Brian Jacques, Tamora Pierce, Anne McCaffery, Kristin Britain, Phillip Pullman... all had fantasy books published in 1998, and many were YA, so in *that* sense, you are wrong that 'other books didn't take off like hp did'.

And most of those authors? Well established well before JK Rowling even came on the scene. She's still a relative newcomer to the scifi/fantasy scene.

I mean, yeah, it's great you still enjoy her books, but there were definitely other, popular books also published in 1998. She is not the end all, be all of YA fantasy literature. You are allowed to like other books and other series more.