5 ms·

And yet J.K. Rowling became one of the richest women in England by writing a book. More specifically, a children's book. Written engagingly, but with little by

And yet J.K. Rowling became one of the richest women in England by writing a book. More specifically, a children's book. Written engagingly, but with little by way of moral ambiguity or challenge to the reader. And yet this book became suddenly popular, and took over the adult charts as well. If there were ever a literary example of Guitar Hero over learning to play an instrument, this is it. If you ask me, your example is evidence in favour of DaniFong's argument rather than against it.

unalone 18y ago
And yet. And yet Harry Potter says that Voldemort isn't the only evil, that the Ministry that Harry's expecting to take care of him is just as awful in that it hides facts to raise morale. And yet, part of the moral of the book is that if you fight for what's right, there's a chance you're killed for your beliefs. And yet, the father-figure is revealed in the end to be a racist and a bigot and partly a coward. Some of the villains go unpunished. Some innocent people are tortured and killed. The moral of Harry Potter might be that good wins in the end, yeah, but it absolutely offers ambiguity. Never with Harry, but with other people. And that's fine, literarily speaking: it makes Harry and Voldemort into foils, into pure good and pure evil, and from there you can debate the exact nature of good and evil. The story's deeper than it lets on because it's so well written (for the most part) that you can ignore a lot of what's going on because it puts itself very subtly into the background. Furthermore, it ended a lot of the publication limits on what constitutes kid's literature. Suddenly the stories don't have to all end happily ever after, lengthy series with big books are acceptable, and heavily political and religious themes are allowed. That's big: it let kid's lit writers have a lot more respect for their work.
- meredydd 18y ago
  And yet. And yet Harry Potter says that Voldemort isn't the only evil, that the Ministry... I almost put this point into my original comment, because I anticipated this response: Go back and read the first two books. They contain no hints of this sort of thing. It was only after the series became a runaway success that Rowling started to beef up the storyline with such "adult" topics. (And even these themes are fairly bolted-on to a world still fundamentally dominated by Absolute Good and Absolute Evil - or, at least, they started out that way). My argument is that the introduction of these themes, and the retconning of a fairly simplistic world into something more ambiguous, resemble the rereleasing of the original books with "adult covers". They were an after-the-fact response to the way that a children's story became massively popular in the adult world. (Which isn't to say that the books aren't engagingly written, or fun to read. And video games are fun to play - I'm with Randall Munroe on people who look down on those having fun just because they are insufficiently highbrow. But I simply disagree with your argument that the popularity of the original Harry Potter books represents the rise of challenging mental stimulation.)
  - mechanical_fish 18y ago
    The Harry Potter books are deliberately designed to have a more "adult" outlook as they go on because Rowling's core audience was, literally, growing into adolescence and young adulthood as the books came out. The books were published over ten years. Anyone who read the first one at age nine would be nineteen when the last one came out. Is this strategy blatantly commercial? Maybe. The first rule of being a professional writer (as opposed to a self-published wannabe whose Great Novel is found, posthumously, in a desk drawer) is to write stuff that people want to buy. If that's a sin, most pros would go to hell with happiness, as opposed to remaining stuck in their day jobs. Commercial or not, Rowling's change of tone has a perfectly good literary rationale, because her main characters explicitly grow up as the books go on. The books are told from those characters' point of view. At the beginning, they're kids, and they see the world in a kidlike way. At the end, they're adults, and they see an adult world. The consistent yet evolving sophistication of the point of view is one of the things that makes the writing strong. (For an awesome essay on POV, from a very successful commercial screenwriter: http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/wp41.Point.of.View.html http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/wp41.Point.of.View.html )
  - nostrademons 18y ago
    The series was plotted out in full before the first book was published. Some things probably changed in the rewrite, but you can't suddenly take it in a different direction without ruining the coherency of the story. (Just look what happened with the Wheel of Time, or A Song of Ice and Fire, or Heroes Season 2). There're also little details in the prologue of book 1 that only make sense in book 5/6/7, so it's clear that she had the later books in mind when she wrote the first one.

unalone 18y ago

And yet. And yet Harry Potter says that Voldemort isn't the only evil, that the Ministry that Harry's expecting to take care of him is just as awful in that it hides facts to raise morale. And yet, part of the moral of the book is that if you fight for what's right, there's a chance you're killed for your beliefs. And yet, the father-figure is revealed in the end to be a racist and a bigot and partly a coward. Some of the villains go unpunished. Some innocent people are tortured and killed. The moral of Harry Potter might be that good wins in the end, yeah, but it absolutely offers ambiguity. Never with Harry, but with other people. And that's fine, literarily speaking: it makes Harry and Voldemort into foils, into pure good and pure evil, and from there you can debate the exact nature of good and evil. The story's deeper than it lets on because it's so well written (for the most part) that you can ignore a lot of what's going on because it puts itself very subtly into the background. Furthermore, it ended a lot of the publication limits on what constitutes kid's literature. Suddenly the stories don't have to all end happily ever after, lengthy series with big books are acceptable, and heavily political and religious themes are allowed. That's big: it let kid's lit writers have a lot more respect for their work.

meredydd 18y ago
And yet. And yet Harry Potter says that Voldemort isn't the only evil, that the Ministry... I almost put this point into my original comment, because I anticipated this response: Go back and read the first two books. They contain no hints of this sort of thing. It was only after the series became a runaway success that Rowling started to beef up the storyline with such "adult" topics. (And even these themes are fairly bolted-on to a world still fundamentally dominated by Absolute Good and Absolute Evil - or, at least, they started out that way). My argument is that the introduction of these themes, and the retconning of a fairly simplistic world into something more ambiguous, resemble the rereleasing of the original books with "adult covers". They were an after-the-fact response to the way that a children's story became massively popular in the adult world. (Which isn't to say that the books aren't engagingly written, or fun to read. And video games are fun to play - I'm with Randall Munroe on people who look down on those having fun just because they are insufficiently highbrow. But I simply disagree with your argument that the popularity of the original Harry Potter books represents the rise of challenging mental stimulation.)
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  The Harry Potter books are deliberately designed to have a more "adult" outlook as they go on because Rowling's core audience was, literally, growing into adolescence and young adulthood as the books came out. The books were published over ten years. Anyone who read the first one at age nine would be nineteen when the last one came out. Is this strategy blatantly commercial? Maybe. The first rule of being a professional writer (as opposed to a self-published wannabe whose Great Novel is found, posthumously, in a desk drawer) is to write stuff that people want to buy. If that's a sin, most pros would go to hell with happiness, as opposed to remaining stuck in their day jobs. Commercial or not, Rowling's change of tone has a perfectly good literary rationale, because her main characters explicitly grow up as the books go on. The books are told from those characters' point of view. At the beginning, they're kids, and they see the world in a kidlike way. At the end, they're adults, and they see an adult world. The consistent yet evolving sophistication of the point of view is one of the things that makes the writing strong. (For an awesome essay on POV, from a very successful commercial screenwriter: http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/wp41.Point.of.View.html http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/wp41.Point.of.View.html )
- nostrademons 18y ago
  The series was plotted out in full before the first book was published. Some things probably changed in the rewrite, but you can't suddenly take it in a different direction without ruining the coherency of the story. (Just look what happened with the Wheel of Time, or A Song of Ice and Fire, or Heroes Season 2). There're also little details in the prologue of book 1 that only make sense in book 5/6/7, so it's clear that she had the later books in mind when she wrote the first one.