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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 anticip

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.

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.