I think it’s time we as a species realize that harry potter was never good. it was just marketable and gave impressionable kids a lot to project onto.
the reason Joanne got rejected by so many publishers isn’t because they couldn’t see her genius, it’s because the one that picked it up was the first one to realize they could market the shit out of houses, wands, magical pets, etc, the setting was a gold mine for getting kids to project themselves into. it didn’t matter that the plot and characters and writing were all terrible. they even kept adding more elements for this later on with things like patronuses. harry potter was never literature, it was always just a marketing scheme.
I think this revisionism of “HP was terrible all along” misses the point.
Yes, there were some shitty, problematic elements from the start (like the goblins), and yes they were marketable as hell, but I’d say the first few books successfully captured some elements of whimsy, and the humor in them hit the right notes for kids. The first few are not great books but they’re also not terrible. (The later ones were bloated and awful tho, imo).
And of course certain books are published because they’re marketable but that doesn’t mean they’re automatically bad books or lack any entertainment value.
The thing is she doesn’t have to have had bad books to be a bad person. Someone that wrote some decent books that kids liked can still be a shitty person and we need to learn and accept that shitty people can and do make good art or at least quality entertainment.
The reason we need to recognize bad people make good art rather than create a revisionist history that every single thing the person has done was terrible, is because we have to be comfortable with criticizing and condemning (and sometimes boycotting) creators even when things they made were beloved to us at some point, even when there was some good or some entertainment value in the things they created.
I think it’s good to look back at her work with a more critical eye but the first few books were actually decent (regardless of yes, a few shitty flaws like the goblins, and regardless of being super merchandisable). That doesn’t change that she’s still a bigoted dickhole. And we don’t have to pretend everything she created was awful to treat her like a bigoted dickhole.
And accepting the dichotomy of “shitty people can make good things but they’re still shitty” makes it easier to prevent ourselves from getting in a mindset of stanning the things we like when a creator is an awful person.
Recent Harry Potter discourse has reeked of the implicit assumption that there is some kind of moral dimension to having liked her books, with people feeling pride that they, as children, “never liked” Harry Potter or “always knew” it was bad.
It’s argued as if the people who “realized” that Harry Potter was Bad All Along were picking up on some…single big quality that includes both the bigotry of the author and the quality of the story, worldbuilding, et cetera. It’s absolutely bizarre.
But, all of that aside. Holy shit, no, no, no, Harry Potter was not a toy marketing scheme, what on earth, that’s the weirdest thing I’ve heard all day.
The category of children’s lit was on death’s door in the late 90’s. YA was straight up not a thing in the way it is today. Book series still don’t get toy lines by themselves, and the fact that the book-to-movie adaptation of Harry Potter was successful is still kind of a weird fluke. Nobody is publishing a book counting on a film adaptation that can be turned into a toy line, and they sure as hell weren’t in 1997. If that worked James Patterson or whoever the hell that guy is would be doing it.
There are a LOT of series that fit the “capitalist marketing scheme” idea a lot better than Harry Potter (read: Lorien legacies, the unwanteds, wolves of the beyond, fablehaven, wings of fire, that series a while back that was about like animal shapeshifters or something? With a different big name YA author behind every book?) and they haven’t successfully marketed anything except themselves.
Please, not every piece of media that has problems has to have a capitalist conspiracy theory at its core
If you want to dial it back to “Harry Potter was published because the publisher thought they could make money,” all books are published because the publisher thinks they will make money. Publishing is a business. This is how capitalism works.
It was only published because they could make toys is the stupidest nonsense I’ve ever read. Look up who first published the book, and where they were in terms of having any ability to market toys in the 90s.
Oh my god, kids…
Seriously. There was no merchandise at the beginning. Book 1 was very much a surprise hit. The marketability didn’t really begin until several books in, and then it was pretty much just postcards/bookmarks and publishing parties (preferrably taking place in the middle ground between platform 9 and 10 at suitable train stations, who probably got more money out of it than the actual publisher) when a new instalment appeared. You couldn’t get “Harry Potter” style wands. There were no “Harry Potter” style wands. You couldn’t get designated Hogwarts robes. If you wanted to bring Hedwig, you had to get a generic snow owl plush toy; there was no dedicated Harry Potter toy series yet.
The real marketability began with the movies, and of course when WB bought the rights they doubtlessly had merchandise in mind - on top of best-selling family movies - from the start. But the first book was very much a risk for the publisher to take (one that the publisher was hoping would pay off, certainly, that’s the idea behind the business, but nonetheless a risk). And there was value in them beyond “giving impressionable kids something to project onto” - not that there’s anything wrong with that per se. Escapism is a value. Entertainment is a value, or we wouldn’t have so much of it. Selling a fantasy world with magic and dragons to people who otherwise wouldn’t touch fantasy with a ten-foot pole is definitely a value, and that is what happened. There are other series which have, perhaps, made more and better of the School For Magicians scenario! But Harry Potter managed to combine elements of magical realism, urban high fantasy and the long-standing genre of the Boarding School Novel. And that’s probably the true secret of its success: it managed to speak to kids and adults, internationally, well beyond the genre borders of fantasy.
And then it got a film (series) deal and all the corresponding merchandise.
The idea that something must always have been bad (and that the wise and woke could always see that) because the author turns out to be a shit person is ludicrous. Bad people can write good books. Great people can write shit books. People of all sorts can write mediocre but immensely entertaining fiction. The quality of a work of fiction doesn’t reveal, and isn’t determined by, the politics of its creator. Nor is it necessarily fixed. It can change in time, especially for individual readers (“I used to love this but the hype makes me feel kinda meh”; ”I now see that by XYZ you meant ABC; therefore I no longer agree”). It can also remain unchanged - because some readers are in fact able to divorce fiction from reality, and to be aware of the problematic aspects and still enjoy the things they always enjoyed about it.
Yeah I think there’s something deeply disingenuous about insisting Harry Potter was always objectively bad art and there was some kind of international mass delusion about it that made people think it had good qualities
and honestly when I see these takes mounting on one another persistently enough it makes my skin crawl, not because I care that much about Harry Potter but because it’s a large scale manifestation of that tendency toward groupthink-as-virtue that can turn any movement or social group no matter how Good Ideologied into poison.
