fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #7014 ]

⌈ Secret Post #7014 ⌋

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

All secrets have spoiler/content warnings today!

01. [SPOILERS for Big Mouth (kdrama)]

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02. [SPOILERS for Call the Midwife, series 15 finale]

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03. [SPOILERS for Call the Midwife]

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04. [WARNING for discussion of pedophilia]

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05. [WARNING for discussion of ableism]

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06. [WARNING for discussion of JKR/transphobia]

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07. [WARNING for discussion of transphobia, racism]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #1001.
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Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Additionally, people are allowed to like things because they have good memories surrounding those things. Nostalgia can be as much for the experience as it is for the thing itself.

Yeah. I have a lot of nostalgia from things in my childhood, and I know those things weren't that great. I just miss that time of my life, and how it felt to experience those things.

Yeah, like I saw a lot of movies as a kid that quite frankly sucked, but the experience of going to the theater to see them on the big screen with your friends was great. I have nostalgia for that, if not for the actual movies themselves.

Yeah! There were books I read and movies I watched and games I played and places I went that were actually nothing special, however, it all has that kind of gilded aura about it because I was happy back then, or I was friends with someone, or I had a good time with my family, or whatever.

Oz books? hella racist and sexist (because 1909). Marguerite Henry? yeah there's some questionable content between the parts about horses. Classic scif-fi? Wow yeah so much you should side-eye. I still long for the quiet calm of my life when those books were my comfort, the worlds I wanted to live in.

HP for better or worse hits a lot of notes people look for in comfort reads: another world that seems better than the one you're in, an easy read for an easy ride with high and low stakes both, characters your age (when you first read as a child), quippy jokes, and marketable aesthetics. I totally get it, it's not hard to understand the appeal.

Exactly. I never even read the HP books myself but even from the outside it's not at all hard to see why people enjoyed them and still have warm and fuzzy feelings about them. If I had been the right age to be reading them when they came out, I very likely would have loved them too.

NA - Strongly seconding this, and also wanting to add that I think there's an additional type of attachment some of us have to the HP books that has to do with it being a shared pop-cultural experience, and not even just that, but a shared pop-cultural experience that was extremely widespread, sustained itself for a long time, and was at the time overwhelmingly positive. People just loved the series. It lit up the zeitgeist in a way few things ever have, while also being really uncontroversial (apart from inciting the ire of some religious zealots).

I was 12 when The Goblet Of Fire came out, and it felt like everyone was talking about it. Before that, the closest to being involved in pop culture I'd gotten was like...asking for the Spice World CD for my birthday, sharing teen magazines with my friends, and being excited when the McDonald's Happy Meal toys were particularly covetable that month. The HP series was the first time I can remember feeling like I was actually part of a shared pop-cultural experience.

Your second paragraph is absolutely correct. I don't really see anybody who is still a fan of the books argue that they're great literature. They're fun, they hit the right spot. Sometimes that's all it takes. Stuff doesn't have to be really deep or complex or have lots of layered meaning to be enjoyable.

I think anyone asking in earnest why anyone could like Harry Potter has reverse nostalgia goggles. Even if you weren't a big fan yourself at the height of its popularity, asking how anyone would like that trash was rightly considered blatant snobbery by the rest of the world.

Definitely it is obnoxious. Like, almost all stuff that gets really popular, I can see how/why it appeals to people, even if I personally didn't like it. Once in awhile there's something hugely popular that seems like total and utter garbage and I'm shocked that it became huge, but that's uncommon. Harry Potter is NOT one of those things. It's pretty obvious why people like/liked it, and to me it's really silly to pretend that the entire franchise is and always has been terrible and that no one could like it unless they have horrendous taste.

Yeah, Harry Potter is a series where it's not at all difficult to see just how and why it was so huge. What kid WOULDN'T want to receive a letter telling them that they were going to become a wizard and learn magic? Pretty much every kid alive dreams of one day being told there's something special about them that will lead them to a life of adventure and excitement, and Harry Potter is the encapsulation of that fantasy.

[ SECRET POST #7014 ]

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