Oh, and also

[farla]

The book sucked.

I mean, at various points I kept stopping and thinking I'd made a mistake and fallen for one of those fanfics, because the stuff was like someone slavishly copying existing books mixed with fanon speculation, but it matched the lines I found mentioned from the original leak and was written in longwinded style and matched the reviews based on the original leak.

And I should point out that I speed read the book with my brain on complete hold, not thinking about anything. To put this in perspective, I picked up book three, ran into Remus Lupin, thought "lupin, lupus, remus founder of rome yeah I bet that's one of her fitting important names" and then did not figure out he was a werewolf until the announcement by dint of not processing anything in the book or making any effort to figure it out. (Even more precisely, it wasn't even "figure out" since I hadn't paid enough attention to think of it as a mystery) My hate for Harry Potter and the unending bad writing appears only when anyone tries to actually discuss it as being legitimate, at which point I will pull up the text from where it is buried in my brain and rage about how Fred and George's behavior is sociopathic, Slytherin are coded evil and she went halfway back on it when people bitched, the romance was thrown together to get back at her fans, Harry Potter's behavior in the fifth book is not "a great portrayal of typical teenager" and dismissing teenagers complaining about it as such is the height of insanity, there's no way wizards can be living embedded in muggle society with regular muggleborn wizards added yet remain unaware of everything, she's obviously making up half of this as she goes along, she treats magic like it's been around for five minutes and everyone else is incapable of seeing out of the glass box (because a bunch of DUMBASS SCHOOL KIDS are the only ones who ever thought that magic super luck might be useful before a battle). But only when it's brought up. I read at breakneck pace and process nothing and usually end with kind of an "eh".

So you can imagine just how absurd things have to be for me to notice them.

(Those of you who like the books may take this as a ringing endorsement. But understand I think you are insane and/or evil.)

Comments

Re: You probably already figured this out, but...

[farla.livejournal.com]

(You are insane and also evil.)

I don't actually mind the books, so much as the insistence they're more than simply readable. They're a perfectly good light read that doesn't hold up well when you start thinking about the morality of locking a kid in a cabinet for weeks without food or water, and how he survives only because the cabinet was magic, which they didn't know, and came out traumatized to the point of being catatonic, which was okay because it meant Slytherin was at a disadvantage at Quiddich. Um, yay.

The books tend to gloss over this stuff, which is okay as a revenge fantasy sort of thing, but not if you stop assuming Harry and friends are automatically right by default, let alone if you think it's supposed to be written completely straight.

Re: You probably already figured this out, but...

[ember-reignited.livejournal.com]

Bzuh? I don't remember that part at all. But then, there's a lot from those books that I don't remember, as... they're pretty forgettable, frankly. Plus most of them I haven't read more than once. And since, after PoA, that once was when they first came out, which means I was relatively young for most of them, I wasn't exactly evaluating them very thoroughly.

I'm fairly sure that I've matured as a reader since HBP, so I may have an entirely different impression after DH.

Re: You probably already figured this out, but...

[farla.livejournal.com]

^^ One of the (many) problems with the books is Rowling likes to have cutesy Roald Dahl levels of abuse, which tend to get side mentions rather than happen on camera - Ron idly comments his brothers gave him an acid lollypop that ate through his mouth when he was a kid, or that when he was five they tried to make him swear an unbreakable vow. A Slytherin is shoved into the cabinet by Fred and George and locked there. Later it's mentioned he was considered missing, then still later that he finally escaped after several weeks but was badly confused by what happened and had to stay in the hospital wing. The events are all off camera, separated by a lot of pages, and rarely have the dots connected between them, as well as finishing up with a "Well, he's alive and mostly okay now" ending and being treated as no big deal in the narration.

Now, if we're in happy no consequence schoolkid revenge fantasy world, this is fine. But the moment you move beyond that, it gets creepy.