Why no Harry Potter, eh?

[sweettalkeress.livejournal.com]

So I looked at ONTD's "Ten of the most Epidemically Overrated Books," and was incensed to find that books like On the Road and The Great Gatsby made the list but the Harry Potter series didn't (though at least the Twilight series did). I mean really, Harry Potter is the epitome of an overrated book series, given that there are people seriously making the point that it's so deep and meaningful and needs to be read in AP English classes. Never mind that it's a children's book series!

Well, these were the people who said that a bunch of authors besides Rowling disliked the idea of fanfiction without bothering to consider WHY they might feel that way (specifically, that Rowling is the only one who's all that fandom savvy because she's modern in a way that the others aren't). Maybe they just think Rowling is their darling author too, and you can't say anything bad about her.

Comments

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

Maybe they see Voldemort as so evil that there's no chance that he could ever be good, not even in an AU scenario. Or they feel that such a scenario undermines Voldemort's role as villain.

Yeah, I guess, like people who get upset if you point out that Hitler was horribly abused, and that played a role in turning him into a monster. It doesn't excuse his evilness by any means, but the point of researching people like that is to figure out why they turned out that way, so you can find ways to prevent it in the future. But people who think in strictly black-or-white (i.e., extremely childish and unsubtle) terms seem to believe that any reference to a villain being not villainous, even if its clearly an AU, is some kind of denial of their villainy. Of course, if Voldemort weren't such a lame villain, it wouldn't be so easy to undermine him.

I know I talk a lot about Warriors, but they handled this so much better regarding their major villain, Tigerclaw. He's never been depicted as "born irredeemably evil." Instead, he was shown as a smart, strong-willed kitten who was abandoned by his father in a particularly shameful way, and who came under the influence of a bad mentor, who encouraged his worst tendencies. Nobody in the Warriors fandom has suggested that makes him an inferior villain, or suggested it's wrong to have sympathy for him. Even his creators have written positive things about him. No only that, on the official site, there are threads for fans who rave about how great he is, and talk about how much they hate the major series hero, Fireheart. Those fans are not attacked by rabid canon whores, unlike HP. Warriors fans are like the SH fans in that way.

Hmmm. I guess that means Warriors fans are smarter than HP fans. Hah!

TBC